Ambedkar saw caste itself, not just untouchability, as the target of annihilation.

Evidence

Ambedkar stayed away from these meetings. He had begun to grow sceptical about these very public but completely out-of-character displays of solicitude for Untouchables. He saw that these were ways in which, in the changing times, the privileged castes were manoeuvring to consolidate their control over the Untouchable community. While his audience, his constituency and his chief concern were the Untouchables, Ambedkar believed that it was not just the stigma, the pollution–purity issues around untouchability, but caste itself that had to be dismantled. The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was—the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck—was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity. (The caste system is the feudal version of the doctrine of trusteeship: the entitled must be left in possession of their entitlement, and be trusted to use it for the public good.) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 301

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that untouchability is merely the performative ritual end of caste while ‘the real violence’ is the denial of entitlement is the conceptual hinge of the entire book — caste’s true harm is systemic dispossession, not ritual stigma.
• XREF: The parenthetical identifying caste as the ‘feudal version of the doctrine of trusteeship’ directly foreshadows Ambedkar’s demolition of Gandhi’s trusteeship argument later in the text.

Related

• Ambedkar held that caste itself, not untouchability, must be dismantled (similarity 0.94)
• Ambedkar saw anti-untouchability gestures as privileged-caste strategies to retain control (similarity 0.92)
• Hinduism’s pervasiveness makes renouncing caste seem impracticable to many (similarity 0.84)
• Ambedkar declared caste inequality must be rooted out, not merely untouchability (similarity 0.83)
• Gandhi’s untouchability reform fails for leaving shastra sanctity unquestioned. (similarity 0.82)
• Caste Hindus wanted to exclude Untouchables while denying those excluded any power of self-determination. (similarity 0.82)
• Ambedkar, an Untouchable, dared to challenge a deified Gandhi (similarity 0.82)
• Gandhi’s lieutenant publicly told caste Hindus caste itself need not go (similarity 0.82)
• Destroying caste requires denying shastra authority outright, as Buddha and Nanak did. (similarity 0.81)
• Ambedkar resolved to abandon Hinduism to escape the stigma of untouchability. (similarity 0.81)
• Hindu reformers reframed caste as untouchability to avoid addressing economic exploitation. (similarity 0.81)
• Reformers narrowed caste to untouchability to avoid land and wealth redistribution. (similarity 0.81)
• Untouchability status followed Ambedkar even to Parsis who rejected him (similarity 0.81)
• Hindu revivalists proselytised Untouchables to retain them in subordination. (similarity 0.81)
• Gandhi sought abolition of untouchability but retention of the caste system (similarity 0.81)