The Ambedkarite view of Hinduism thus reflects a deep scepticism about the prospects of internal reform, combined with a belief that only a total civilisational rejection of the Hindu shrutis—the Shruti corpus comprising the four Vedas along with their associated Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads—could create the necessary social rupture to annihilate caste.

The logical conclusion of such a conception of Hinduism was not reform but withdrawal. Since, according to Ambedkar, caste hierarchy was embedded into Hinduism, emancipation meant rejecting Hinduism at the core. This philosophical trajectory reached its logical end on 14 October 1956, when Ambedkar led a mass conversion ceremony in Nagpur, officially embracing Buddhism whilst simultaneously rejecting Hinduism. At the time, however, this move was hardly a surprise. About two decades earlier, Ambedkar had famously declared at the Yeola conference: "I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu."

In this mass conversion ceremony, Ambedkar also introduced the '22 Vows' to be taken by all his followers, which explicitly called for a rejection of belief in Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Rama, Krishna, Ganesha and Gauri. The vows also call for a total rejection of Hinduism and Hindu thought. Vow 19 reads: "I renounce Hinduism, which is harmful to humanity and impedes the advancement and development of humanity, and adopt Buddhism as my religion."

This declaration was not a mere theological disagreement with Hinduism. It was a normative judgement on Hindu civilisation itself, portraying it as ethically deficient and structurally incapable of reform and progress.

This conception of Buddhism, popularly known as Navayana Buddhism, was not an ancient revival of the Dhamma of the Buddha but a new moral and political project explicitly defined as a sincere opposition to Hinduism. Navayana Buddhism was not meant to be a parallel spiritual tradition harmoniously co-existing with Hinduism but a rival political project meant to disrupt and replace it.

Ambedkar expressed this belief in unmistakable terms when he said that he believed his followers would sacrifice everything to 'establish Buddhism in India'. In this sense, Ambedkar's conversion movement represented a deliberate attempt to construct a post-Hindu framework, grounded in the principles he believed Hindu civilisation could never provide.

The Savarkarite Diagnosis: Caste as a Historical Aberration

Having examined Ambedkar's diagnosis of the caste system as an essential feature of Hinduism, the contrast with the Savarkarite position becomes impossible to ignore. For if caste is understood as intrinsic to Hinduism, emancipation from the caste system necessarily means a total rejection of Hinduism. But if the rigid birth-based caste system is understood as a historical degeneration of an earlier dharmic and just ideal, the possibility of reform opens up. It is precisely on this foundational question that Savarkar and Ambedkar diverge.

For Savarkar, caste was not a constitutive feature of Hinduism but rather a social aberration that had emerged from the wrongful understanding, misinterpretation and social stagnation of the principles laid out in the Vedas. Unlike Ambedkar, Savarkar believed in the concept of a unified Hindu nation that was being held back by caste. In Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar writes:

Sameer Prashanth Rao

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