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The Ambedkarite Times

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Vol I · No 2 · February 2026EN edition14 February 2026

This edition

Ambedkarite Buddhist Movements — A World Report

From Maharashtra to Manhattan, from Tokyo to Toronto, the Navayāna sangha is growing. We bring you a quick world tour of where the movement now stands and what our British chapter can learn from it.

WORLD REPORT · LEAD 1 min read

Seventy years on, the Dhamma Cakra Pravartan keeps turning

Two million pilgrims gathered at Deekshabhoomi in October 2025 to mark the 69th anniversary of Babasaheb's mass conversion. The crowd was the largest in a decade and noticeably younger.

By Special correspondent · Nagpur

On the morning of 15 October 2025, the white stupa of Deekshabhoomi rose out of a sea of blue flags. Two million people — the police estimate, thought conservative by organisers — had travelled from every district of Maharashtra, and from at least eleven other Indian states, to take the Three Refuges and the Twenty-Two Vows that Babasaheb himself administered in 1956.

What was striking, observers told this newspaper, was the demographic shift. A decade ago the crowd was dominated by the elderly, by those born in the same generation as the original conversion. This year, more than half were under the age of thirty. They were students, gig workers, junior IT engineers, primary-school teachers. They came carrying laminated copies of the Twenty-Two Vows on their phones.

The Dhamma Cakra Pravartan — the turning of the wheel of Dhamma — shows no sign of slowing. If anything, it has begun to accelerate across borders. The chapters that follow report from four very different parts of the world.

Babasaheb said on that famous October day: 'I was born a Hindu, but I shall not die a Hindu.' Two million voices repeated those words this October. The British sangha was represented by a small delegation from London and Stockport. They came home, they told us, exhausted and electrified.

UNITED STATES 1 min read

From Queens to Berkeley — the American Navayāna takes root

A growing diaspora is opening vihāras in cities once marked only by Hindu temples and ISKCON centres.

By Anjali Chavan, New York

There are now twenty-seven registered Ambedkarite Buddhist associations across the United States, up from nine in 2020. The largest, the Bhīmrāo Ambedkar International Mission, runs a vihāra in Queens that draws three hundred worshippers each Sunday. Berkeley, California hosts an annual Babasaheb birth-anniversary lecture at the university.

Crucially, second-generation Indian-Americans — many of whose parents left India in the 1990s as IT professionals — are openly identifying as Buddhist on US Census paperwork. The Pew Research Center estimates the number of self-described Ambedkarite Buddhists in America has tripled in five years, though the absolute figure remains small.

The American sangha shares many of our British concerns: how to keep the political and the spiritual in their proper proportion, how to raise children fluent in both Pāli refuge formulae and the country's first language, how to support members through bereavement when no family priest exists to perform the rites. We are in conversation.

JAPAN 1 min read

The Japan-Ambedkar friendship enters its eighth decade

Ven. Sasai Surai, the centenarian Japanese monk who served the movement at Nagpur for sixty years, has named a successor.

By Kenji Watanabe, Tokyo

It is hard to overstate the role played by Reverend Sasai Surai in post-1956 Indian Buddhism. A Japanese monk who arrived in India in 1965 with little more than a robe, he became a central figure at Deekshabhoomi and worked for sixty years to keep alive Babasaheb's vision of a casteless sangha.

On his hundredth birthday last summer, Ven. Sasai formally appointed Ven. Eishō Tanaka as his successor in the Japan-India Buddhist Friendship Association. Ven. Tanaka, who has spent two decades shuttling between Tokyo and Nagpur, told this correspondent that the work ahead is to make the friendship two-way: to bring more Indian Ambedkarites to study in Japan, and more Japanese lay people to participate in Vesākha at Deekshabhoomi.

ABS-UK has begun preliminary correspondence with the Association about a possible exchange visit in 2027 — watch this space.

UNITED KINGDOM 1 min read

What the world tour means for Stockport

The British sangha is small. That is also our advantage.

By ABS-UK Editorial

Britain has, by the most generous count, fewer than fifteen thousand self-identifying Ambedkarite Buddhists. Beside Maharashtra's twenty million we are tiny. Beside the American sangha we are quieter.

But smallness has its gifts. We can know each other by name. We can share lifts to events. A child growing up in our community can be personally taught the Refuges by an elder, not merely watch them on YouTube. The bonds we build now, while we are few, will hold the society together for the next fifty years.

What we ask of every reader — whether you arrived in Britain in 1968 or were born here last summer — is this: come once. Come to a Vesākha. Come to a study circle. Come to the AGM. Bring a friend. The world movement is alive; the British branch grows when each of us decides, personally, that it shall.

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