As Ambedkar is increasingly dispersed amid multiple claimants, it has become urgent to probe his writings to extract the core of his thought. Such a philosophical engagement was undertaken by Althusser with his return to Marx, and Lacan to Freud. Soumyabrata Choudhury similarly ‘returns’ to Ambedkar, guided by Alain Badiou’s philosophical system. Impious and partisan, he finds the ‘untouchable’ leader asking himself: What can the existence of caste teach us about equality? Ambedkar, the activist and politician, is upheld as a thinker with supreme fidelity to the “norm of equality”, a figure in a long line of immortals from Pericles and Abbe Sieyes to Toussaint L’Ouverture, to wager on the absolute value of equality undeterred by its absence on the ground.