Dalits claim land and civil rights through Ambedkar statues holding the Constitution

Evidence

All the same, Ambedkar’s followers have kept his legacy alive in creative ways. One of those ways is to turn him into a million mass-produced statues. The Ambedkar statue is a radical and animate object. It has been sent forth into the world to claim the space—both physical and virtual, public and private—that is the Dalit’s due. Dalits have used Ambedkar’s statue to assert their civil rights—to claim land that is owed them, water that is theirs, commons they are denied access to. The Ambedkar statue that is planted on the commons and rallied around always holds a book in its hand. Significantly, that book is not Annihilation of Caste with its liberating, revolutionary rage. It is a copy of the Indian Constitution that Ambedkar played a vital role in conceptualising—the document that now, for better or for worse, governs the life of every single Indian citizen. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete case of how caste annihilation was institutionally scaled (via constitution) rather than kept as revolutionary text — ties to the reader’s stated purpose. — connects to: Buddha statues serve as deliberate territorial markers against minorities — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 288
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 103