Earlier this year, the Republic of India turned seventy. On January 26, 1950, the country adopted a new Constitution, which severed all ties with the British Empire, mandated multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise, abolished caste and gender distinctions, awarded equal rights of citizen-ship to religious minorities, and in myriad other ways broke with the feudal, hierarchical, and sectarian past. The chairman of the Drafting Committee was the great scholar B. R. Ambedkar, himself a “Dalit,” born into the lowest and most oppressed strata of Indian society, and representative in his person and his beliefs of the sweeping social and political transformations that the document promised to bring about.