Debate the issue of whether and how contemporary movements for assertion of Dalit identity work towards annihilation of caste.

In 'Annihilation of Caste' (1936), Ambedkar meant destroying the caste system itself — endogamy, graded hierarchy and its scriptural sanction — not merely improving one caste's position. Contemporary Dalit assertion must be debated against that standard.

How assertion works towards annihilation

• Political assertion — Dalit parties, reservations and panchayat leadership — breaks the monopoly of dominant castes over power.
• Cultural revolt — Dalit literature, Ambedkar iconography and Buddhist conversions (since 1956) — rejects ritual subordination and reclaims dignity.
• Rights mobilisation — from the Dalit Panthers (1972) to the Una protests (2016) and campaigns after Rohith Vemula's death — enforces the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and makes humiliation politically costly.
• International framing of caste as descent-based discrimination (Durban, 2001) delegitimises hierarchy globally.

Why annihilation remains distant

• Mobilisation by caste can consolidate caste consciousness rather than dissolve it; sub-caste rivalries (e.g., Madiga–Mala categorisation disputes) fragment the community.
• Endogamy — the load-bearing wall of caste — is nearly intact: inter-caste marriages remain around five per cent (IHDS).
• Electoral politics accommodates and counts castes as vote blocs rather than abolishing them; material bases of caste — landlessness, segregated settlements, occupational stigma and continuing atrocities recorded by NCRB — persist largely untouched.

Assertion is thus a necessary stage: it destroys the legitimacy of hierarchy even while using caste as its vehicle. Annihilation, as Ambedkar argued, additionally demands inter-caste marriage, material redistribution and the collapse of scriptural sanction.