Nearly all men can stand adversity, but to test the character, give him power.

What the line is asking

• Adversity: exam, poverty, defeat — a test of endurance.
• Power: office, money, following, a gun, a majority.
• Lincoln (as traditionally given): the second test is the real one. Acton’s cousin: power tends to corrupt.

Self

• A promotion that thins listening is the desert after the forest of struggle.
• Privilege that never met adversity can also fail the test — softness is not virtue if it never had a choice.

Society

• Caste and gender: who has always had a small empire at home. The line is not only about CM chairs.

State and office

• Discretion in a file, a transfer, a tender: character as procedure — noting, reason, appeal.
• Peg: Articles 14, 32, CAG, a free press — the republic’s way of not trusting the saint in the chair.

Politics

• A movement born in jail can become a patronage machine. Adversity was the brand; power is the audit.

The counter

Power is not original sin. A collector who uses it to open a fair-price shop is passing the test. Ambedkar wanted the depressed classes to have power, then to bind it with constitutional morality. The quote tests character; it does not preach helplessness.