Gandhi’s purity politics derived directly from the caste system itself

Evidence

Essentially, his idea of satyagraha revolved around a regimen of renunciation and purification. Renunciation naturally segued into a missionary approach to politics. The emphasis on purity and purification obviously derived from the caste system, though Gandhi inverted the goalposts and called his later ministrations to Untouchables a process of ‘self-purification’. On the whole, it was a brand of hair-shirt Christianity combined with his own version of Hinduism and esoteric vegetarianism (which ended up underlining the ‘impurity’ of Dalits, Muslims and all the rest of us meat-eaters—in other words, the majority of the Indian population). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 231

Essentially, his idea of satyagraha revolved around a regimen of renunciation and purification. Renunciation naturally segued into a missionary approach to politics. The emphasis on purity and purification obviously derived from the caste system, though Gandhi inverted the goalposts and called his later ministrations to Untouchables a process of ‘self-purification’. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: the weapon Gandhi used against untouchability was itself mined from the caste ideology Ambedkar sought to annihilate.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how reformist movements can internalize and redeploy the very purity logics of the systems they oppose.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 231