On Wednesday (December 18), once again, amid fierce uproar in parliament, the name of B.R. Ambedkar remained in the headlines. Opposition parties protested against the remarks made by Union home minister Amit Shah about Ambedkar and demanded an apology from him.
On Tuesday, while targeting the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Shah had said:
“Abhi ek fashion ho gaya hai – Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar. Itna naam agar bhagwan ka lete to saat janmon tak swarg mil jata. [It has become a fashion now to say ‘Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar’. Had you taken god’s name so many times, you would have got a place in heaven.]”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to X to defend Shah. In a series of five posts on X, Modi said that Shah had “exposed the Congress’s dark history of insulting Dr. Ambedkar and ignoring the SC/ST Communities.”
