There is a particular kind of forgetting that masquerades as remembrance. On April 14, the Indian republic performed it with remarkable efficiency. Statues were garlanded. Tweets were dispatched. Ministers paid floral tributes on gleaming marble plinths. Quote cards bloomed across WhatsApp groups, with aphorisms such as “education is the milk of a lioness” attributed to Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, cropped from its context, rendered in blue and white, and forwarded 17 times before breakfast.What we witnessed was not a lack of remembrance, but a particular kind of remembering. One that transforms a radical thinker into a familiar icon. Over time, this process converts a critic into a symbol and a challenge into an ornament. Ambedkar’s image circulated widely across platforms, but the force of his arguments recedes from public engagement. This is not crude censorship, but a subtler transformation: the expansion of visibility alongside the thinning of meaning.Ambedkar was not merely a constitution-maker. He was a philosopher of social democracy who argued that political liberty without economic and social equality is a grand deception. He was a relentless diagnostician of caste, not as a cultural curiosity or historical residue, but as a living system of graded hierarchy sustained through institutional violence and epistemic exclusion. He was a man who converted to Buddhism weeks before his death, not in a personal spiritual journey but in a deliberate, theorised act of political refusal. These are not comfortable ideas. They do not fit neatly onto a graphic card.Yet that is precisely where mainstream journalism most often places them. The coverage is not hostile to Ambedkar. It is something worse. It is fond. It treats him the way one treats a beloved ancestor: with warmth, with annual ritual and with a careful avoidance of anything he might have actually said about the world we continue to inhabit.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Articles with titles like ‘Ten Inspirational Quotes by Dr BR Ambedkar’ and ‘Best Messages, Wishes for Ambedkar Jayanti’ reorganise his political thought into visually neat, easily shareable units. His sustained critiques of caste power, social stratification and economic exploitation are flattened into broadly affirmative statements about justice, education and morality. His face circulates everywhere. His arguments go largely unread.This process turns a radical thinker into a widely recognisable public figure whose image travels easily across social platforms, while the force of his arguments becomes easier to overlook. Once reduced to a symbol, Ambedkar can be invoked without engaging his arguments.Meaning is never simply transmitted. Over decades, mainstream public culture has decoded Ambedkar as a figure of constitutional heritage and moral inspiration rather than a thinker whose central argument was that the Indian social order needed structural demolition. What is quietly lost in this framing is not peripheral to Ambedkar but essential to him, his insistence that caste is not a cultural relic awaiting gradual reform but a living architecture of power that political democracy alone cannot dismantle.The result is a contradiction that the republic has learned to inhabit with remarkable comfort, the simultaneous veneration of the man who built anti-discrimination law into the Constitution and the quiet tolerance of the discrimination that law was designed to end.The violence that speaks, and the counter-public that respondsThe periodic desecration of Ambedkar statues across India tells a story that ceremonial coverage refuses to tell. Incidents of beheading, paint-throwing, limb-breaking and pedestal-defacement have been documented with grim regularity in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Punjab and beyond. Mainstream news typically processes these events through the administrative frame – police FIRs are filed, political condemnations are issued, restoration is promised and the cycle closes.What this frame systematically excludes is the why. Ambedkar statues in Dalit localities are not merely decorative. They are assertions of presence in spaces historically governed by untouchability, spaces from which Dalit communities were excluded, not metaphorically but materially. The statues announce: we are here, we belong here, we refuse erasure.To report these incidents without this interpretive context is not neutrality. It is a choice, a tendency to prioritise social harmony over deeper structural questions from the friction of caste truth. Mainstream coverage tends to prioritise order, closure and administrative response.Platforms like The Mooknayak, by contrast, document the emotional texture of these events, the elderly residents in distress, the youth who gather through the night, the neighbourhood meetings convened not to demand law and order but to affirm collective dignity.These are not the same story wearing different clothes. They are different stories about what kind of country India is.Digital platforms promised to break this comfortable arrangement, and in partial ways they have. Anti-caste movements, diaspora advocacy networks and community-led platforms have used online spaces to circulate Ambedkarite thought with a directness and reach that earlier generations of activists could not have imagined.Yet the attention economy that governs these platforms is not neutral. It rewards virality over rigour, recognisability over argument, and emotional resonance over analytical depth. Ambedkar consequently travels across feeds and timelines most efficiently when he travels most efficiently in simplified, highly shareable forms. The internet, in this sense, has not abolished caste but given it new syntax.What honest commemoration would actually requireAn honest engagement with Ambedkar’s legacy would not merely ask what he said. It would ask what he was responding to, and whether those conditions persist. The answer, documented in statistics on caste-based violence, atrocity reports, institutional underrepresentation and the ongoing social geography of untouchability, is unambiguous.It would also require honesty about who gets to speak about Ambedkar, and in whose interest. The appropriation of his image by political formations that have opposed caste data collection and resisted structural reform is not evidence of his universal appeal. It is evidence that his commodification is complete enough to be deployed without intellectual consequence.Ambedkar’s thought was grounded in a philosophical tradition shaped by John Dewey’s pragmatism, by the Buddhist ethics of collective welfare and moral agency, and by the jurisprudence of constitutional dignity. His conversion to Navayana Buddhism was not a retreat from politics but an extension of it: a refusal to seek dignity within a system designed to deny it, and an assertion that liberation must be built on entirely different foundations.To reduce this vision to shareable motivational content is not merely to misrepresent a thinker. It is to perform, at the level of culture, precisely the operation that Ambedkar spent his life opposing: the management of dissent through symbolic incorporation.Independent journalism represents the most serious effort to resist this commodification. When The Mooknayak connects Ambedkar Jayanti to the Mahad Satyagraha and to contemporary demands for the Rohith Bill 2026 of Karnataka government, it is doing something the mainstream media rarely does, like treating Ambedkar’s ideas as live political arguments rather than archived national heritage.This, ultimately, is the test of genuine reverence: not the garlanded statue, not the ministerial tweets, not the curated quote card, but the willingness to follow an argument wherever it leads, including into discomfort, inconvenience and structural accountability.Ambedkar did not ask to be celebrated. He asked to be understood. He asked that the republic he helped build on the foundations of liberty, equality and fraternity actually deliver those things to those for whom they were most urgently intended.We continue to circulate the image while evading the argument. It is time to choose otherwise.Nookaraju Bendukurthi and John Babu Koyye are assistant professors with the department of communication and journalism at the Central University of Kashmir. Hima Bindu Mukthipudi is an assistant professor with the department of politics and governance at the same university.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.