In Hungary, Ambedkar inspiring oppressed Roma become agents of change

Ambedkar is a gypsy icon in Hungary," says Tibor Derdak over the phone from Miskolc, a city two hours from Budapest, right before stepping out to vote on Sunday. It was here 20 years ago that Derdak co-founded a school named after Dr B R Ambedkar who never visited Hungary. Today, an Ambedkar statue stands near the light-blue building of Dr Ambedkar School. "Ambedkar's life story is a fairytale for the Roma community," says Derdak, referring to the long-oppressed ethnic community in Eastern Europe whom the school serves. The story of a man denied school admission who goes abroad, becomes a barrister, fights caste oppression and writes the constitutional framework of his nation has grown deep roots in this unlikely landscape. It began around 2005, when Derdak—a sociologist and former member of the Hungarian parliament—and János Orsós, a Roma activist who had spent years trying to keep teenagers from the community in school, were invited by Triratna Buddhist Organisation to travel to Dhamma retreats in Maharashtra. What they encountered changed everything. "Similar complexion, similar stories of being othered," Derdak recalls. "Yet, we saw people from oppressed communities reach important positions in society. We thought we, too, can." The connection is not only ideological. The Roma originally emigrated from north India nearly 1,000 years ago. In Maharashtra, the shock of recognition was visceral and the inspiration practical. Derdak returned and began translating Ambedkar's texts into Hungarian—stories like Prakriti's from Chandalika and the entire Pune Pact, the foundational document for the idea of reservation. "We wanted to reproduce the impact he had on his people," he says. Dr Ambedkar School that emerged from that labour has since become something of a pilgrimage site for Roma activists across Europe. Each morning, 125 students in classes 9-12 enter beneath a brass plaque embossed in Hungarian and Hindi. The inscription closes with a line that would have startled Ambedkar: "He is a Buddhist saint." Artist Akshay Mahajan, who visited in 2013, recalls students asking to be taught numbers in Hindi, thrilled by words their languages shared—chhora for boy, chhori for girl. The historical debts, he says, run deeper than ideology. "Were it not for the Roma, Europe might never have had the guitar. They carried string instruments westward from Persia and beyond." Inside, students prepare for Hungary's national exams but also study Ambedkar's speeches alongside Roma history—two narratives of oppression that are striking in their parallels. Roma children have long been segregated into underfunded schools, declared "mentally challenged" and routed into special institutions, with nearly 90% of such students reportedly from the community. Derdak recalls separate cups and plates for Roma children in schools as recently as a decade ago. "Untouchability," he says flatly. "Just with different words." In a city where 15% of the population is Roma, nothing in public space acknowledges their existence. The 16-year regime of Viktor Orban, the country's longest serving prime minister, tested everything, says Derdak. The school once operated as a Buddhist church high school, which afforded legal protection. Then the Orban govt moved to deregister churches it deemed insufficiently established. Fifteen years of financial precarity followed. The school's graduates are the argument Derdak is making. Kuru Janos arrived at 16 with only a Class 6 education. He graduated five years later, went on to university in Budapest, and returned as a local leader. A teenage girl became a social worker. Melinda Erdei Nagi—raised in a Methodist home—graduated and came back as the school secretary.Derdak quotes Ambedkar unprompted: "I measure the progress of a community by what women have achieved." In villages where the school has worked, young girls have begun to see education as real. The demographic explosion, he says, has slowed.There is one detail Derdak mentions that stays with you. The Roma flag—blue above, green below, a red wheel at its centre—was adopted at the first World Roma Congress near London in 1971, partly funded by the Indian govt. The wheel was a deliberate act of memory: a dharma chakra, proposed by an attaché from the Indian High Commission, binding the Roma symbolically to the subcontinent they had left 1,000 years before. "It was meaningful for illiterate gypsy people," Derdak says. "They did not know the word. But they chose the wheel."As the election results emerge and Orban is ousted, Derdak rejoices. "The dictatorship has fallen." The wheel, as ever, has turned.
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