Editing India (section)

=== Ambedkar and the Conversion of 1956 ===

{{Main|BR Ambedkar}}
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), jurist, principal architect of the Indian Constitution, and the leader of the untouchable communities, announced at Yeola in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu. Ober argues against the common view that he built his Buddhism from nothing: he met Bodhananda in 1920, studied Pali with Ishwardatt Medharthi, approached Dharmanand Kosambi and the Bombay Buddha Society in 1936, and was helped to attend the World Fellowship of Buddhists in [[Burma]] in 1954 by the monk Dharmarakshita.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 5.</ref> On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he and his wife took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the Arakanese-Burmese monk U Chandramani of Kushinagar, and he then administered twenty-two vows of his own composition to the crowd. Sources give the number converted differently, from 200,000 to 600,000. (See the page on [[Dalit Buddhism]].) Ambedkar spoke on Buddhism and communism at the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu on 20 November 1956, and died on 6 December. His late essay "Buddha or Karl Marx" compares Buddhism with Marxism as rival remedies for social suffering; the secondary debate about it is summarized on the Ambedkar page. Geetha reads him as a critic of Indian communism who did not call himself a socialist, for whom socialism was nonetheless a "spectral presence" in his thought.

==== State Buddhism as Foil ====

The Indian state of the same years used Buddhism for its own purposes, and the two projects only partly overlapped. Ober reports that the dharmachakra replaced Gandhi's charkha on the national flag in 1947, the Ashokan lion capital became the state emblem, the government marked the "2,500 Years of Buddhism" in 1956, it toured relics of the Buddha's disciples through India's border regions and abroad as an instrument of diplomacy, and the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 was named after Buddhist precepts. Ambedkar, the only nationally prominent Indian politician who called himself a Buddhist, was not invited, according to Ober, to Nehru's relic ceremony at Sanchi in 1952, and Nehru rebuffed his request in 1956 for funds to distribute ''The Buddha and His Dhamma''.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7, pp. 252–283 (citing Ambedkar 1993: 191–192).</ref> The state's Buddhism came under strain from Ambedkar's conversion, from the [[Tenzin Gyatso|Dalai Lama]]'s flight in 1959, and from the Sino-Indian war of 1962.