Vision of Begampura is a reminder of what should be

The homage to Sant Ravidas before the Union Budget announcement did not merely invoke a saint for symbolism; it signalled a deeper message of social harmony, moral confidence, and forward movement together. Revisiting the life and legacy of Guru Sant Ravidas is not just about remembrance. It is an inquiry into India’s civilisational ethics — how dignity is constructed, inclusion practised, and how social healing unfolds through sustained moral action. Born into a marginalised community and earning his living as a cobbler, Sant Ravidas infused everyday work with spiritual dignity. His challenge to hierarchy was ethical, personal, and deeply unsettling to entrenched social assumptions. His vision of Begampura was a moral one, shaped by lived experience. Ravidas reminded society that dignity cannot be conditional, and that harmony is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. In a civilisation often tempted by ritual over ethics, his insistence on equality within faith remains sharply relevant.

In recent years, India has begun to publicly acknowledge figures who were long revered in community memory but absent from national symbolism. Ayodhya airport’s naming after Maharshi Valmiki, and now Adampur’s association with Sant Ravidas, tell a larger story of transition. For communities long denied representation in elite public spaces, such recognition does not undo historical injustice, but it signals an attempt to correct the asymmetry of remembrance. In that sense, the Sant Ravidas airport is an act of social repair. A similar reworking of symbolism was visible during the installation of the Sengol in the new Parliament building, consecrated by OBC pandits. For centuries, ritual authority was monopolised by lineage. That moment quietly disrupted inherited hierarchies through participation. Sant Ravidas would have instinctively understood this. The same ethical instinct was visible decades earlier when Kameshwar Chaupal laid the first stone of the Ram Mandir in 1989.

Even constitutional debates often seen through legal or security lenses carry this moral dimension. The removal of Article 370, for instance, extended long-denied rights to Dalits, OBCs, and women in Jammu and Kashmir. Ravidas did not speak the language of constitutionalism, but his position was unmistakable: Justice cannot be selective, and harmony cannot coexist with invisibility. What connects these developments is not ideology alone, but intent — the attempt to move from symbolic inclusion to structural participation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emphasis on “sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas” resonates here as an aspiration aligned with Ravidas’s ethical universe.

Ravidas reminds us that real social change shows itself in who is honoured, who performs rituals, who gains rights, and who feels less afraid to belong. The renaming of Adampur airport, alongside Ayodhya’s tribute to Valmiki, represent a transformation in the imagination of the marginalised — from the periphery to the centre of the nation’s moral geography. That quiet work of social healing may be Sant Ravidas’s most enduring legacy — and perhaps India’s most urgent responsibility.

The writer is national spokesperson, BJP