Dr B. R. Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, near Indore, the fourteenth and last child of Ramji Sakpal and Bhimabai. Born into a caste treated as untouchable, he met exclusion at school from the age of six. He became the leading voice of India's Depressed Classes, now called Dalits, and is best known as chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution of India.

Ambedkar and the Panth

• 13 October 1935: at Yeola, presiding over a conversion conference, he told the Depressed Classes to leave Hinduism and vowed that he would not die a Hindu.
• 1936: the SGPC's executive took up his declaration on 25 January, and its general session on 1 March resolved to set up a preaching mission. The Sarb Hind Sikh Prachar Conference then met at Amritsar on 11 to 13 April 1936, with Ambedkar among those present. He addressed it and repeated his intention to leave Hinduism.
• At that conference 94 people took the rites of the Khalsa, at least 43 of them non-Sikhs from outside Punjab, and a permanent Sarb Hind Sikh Mission was formed at Amritsar. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Ambedkar and his followers ultimately decided not to adopt Sikhism, though the Mission's centres kept up useful work.

Elsewhere in his life

• 1942 to June 1946: Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council.
• 1947: joined Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet as India's first Minister of Law and became chairman of the Drafting Committee, which he guided through to the adoption of the Constitution.
• September 1951: resigned from the Cabinet, embittered that Nehru and the Congress had not backed his Hindu Code Bill as they had promised.
• 14 October 1956: formally converted to Buddhism at Nagpur, with many thousands of Mahars and other Dalits.
• 6 December 1956: died in his sleep, on the night of 5 or 6 December.

What he is remembered for: the Constitution, the campaign against caste, and the mass conversion at Nagpur. For the Panth, he is the man who came to Amritsar in 1936 to the conference the SGPC called in response to his declaration. What the record here shows is the offer and the outcome. It does not explain why he did not choose Sikhism, and the reasons are argued over (see analysis).