What is the name of the city mayor who proclaimed April 14, 2025, as Dr.

B. R. Ambedkar Day in New York City?

Question

What is the name of the city mayor who proclaimed April 14, 2025, as Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Day in New York City?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Eric Adams. Eric Adams was Mayor of New York City from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2025, so on 14 April 2025 he was the only one of the three men named who held that office at all, and it was he who issued the proclamation designating that date Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Day in New York City. The date is not arbitrary: Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891, so 14 April 2025 was his 134th birth anniversary — the day already observed across India as Ambedkar Jayanti. The proclamation came around observances at United Nations Headquarters in New York, where Ambedkar's birth anniversary has been marked since 2016, and it was pressed for by Indian-American organisations, the campaign being led by Deelip Mhaske of the Foundation for Human Horizon. Its citation honoured Ambedkar as a man who fought exploitation and who spent his life working for diversity, equity and inclusion — American civic vocabulary applied to an Indian constitutional figure, which is itself the point of the story. A mayoral proclamation of this kind is honorific rather than legislative: it creates no public holiday and carries no legal effect, but it is the standard instrument by which a United States city formally recognises a community and a legacy. There is a historical closure in the choice of city that the question does not mention and that is worth carrying away. Ambedkar himself came to New York in 1913, aged 22, on a Baroda State scholarship of £11.50 a month awarded under a scheme of Sayajirao Gaekwad III, and studied economics at Columbia University under the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey; his Columbia doctorate followed in 1927. The city that proclaimed a day in his name in 2025 is the city that trained him 112 years earlier.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Bill de Blasio was Eric Adams's immediate predecessor as Mayor of New York City, in office from 2014 to 2021. He had left City Hall more than three years before April 2025 and so could not have issued this proclamation. He is the classic 'one term out of date' distractor, and it works on candidates who learned a name years ago and never refreshed it. The safeguard is to store office-holders as spans rather than as bare names: 'de Blasio 2014–2021, Adams 2022–2025' answers this question in a second, while 'de Blasio, Mayor of New York' answers nothing.  (c) Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London, not of New York — he has held that office since May 2016 and was re-elected in 2021 and again in 2024. He is in the option list because he is by some distance the best-known city mayor in the Western world to an Indian newspaper reader, and because a question about an Indian figure being honoured abroad primes exactly that association. But the stem names New York City, and the mayor of a different city on a different continent has no authority to proclaim anything there. The error under test is a city-office mismatch, not ignorance of who Khan is.  (d) Only one person can be Mayor of New York City on a given date, and on 14 April 2025 that person was Eric Adams. The three names cannot overlap even in principle: de Blasio's term had ended in 2021, and Sadiq Khan holds a different office in a different country. Since exactly one option is true, this one fails. Notice how weak the combined option is on office questions in particular — an office is singular by definition, so on any 'who held this post' item it is almost mechanically eliminable, and picking it as a hedge costs 1/3 mark for nothing.

Concept: Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891, Mhow – 6 December 1956, New Delhi) is honoured on three distinct grounds, and any explanation of why a foreign city marks his birthday has to keep them apart. First, the constitutional ground: he chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly and became independent India's first Law Minister, and the text he steered abolished untouchability under Article 17 and created the right to constitutional remedies under Article 32 — the provision he himself called the heart and soul of the Constitution. Second, the social and political ground: from the Mahad satyagraha of 1927, through the journal Mooknayak, the Independent Labour Party of 1936 and the All India Scheduled Castes Federation of 1942, he built the organised political voice of the depressed classes, and at the Round Table Conferences he pressed their claim to separate electorates before accepting reserved seats instead under the Poona Pact of September 1932. Third, the intellectual ground: a University of Mumbai graduate, an MA and PhD from Columbia University in New York, an MSc and DSc from the London School of Economics and a barrister of Gray's Inn, at a time when only a handful of Indians reached either institution. He publicly embraced Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, weeks before his death, and was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1990. That combination — jurist, trained economist and leader of an oppressed community — is what makes him legible outside India as a civil-rights figure rather than as a national politician, and it is why his birth anniversary has been observed at United Nations Headquarters in New York since 2016 and why a United States mayor could proclaim a day in his name in the language of equity and inclusion.

State PCS 2025 Q19 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q19 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer