As we mark another Ambedkar Jayanti and Dalit History Month, there has been a renewed focus on the contemporary relevance of Ambedkarite thought, especially his conceptualisation of democracy. This revival is taking place at a crucial juncture, when democratic institutions are facing mounting pressures and challenges that undermine their autonomy and integrity. In this context, Ambedkar’s emphasis on the inseparable link between the annihilation of caste and the deepening of democratic structures becomes especially relevant. Central to his thought was a reciprocal relationship that democratising and modernising institutions is essential for dismantling caste, while the annihilation of caste is, in turn, foundational for any meaningful democratisation. In this formulation, caste is a pervasive ideological system that permeates all social and political institutions.
Eradicating caste therefore requires an 'abolitionist' approach, one that seeks to radically democratise every institution, including those often considered progressive, such as educational spaces and even state bodies tasked with safeguarding Dalit welfare. Educational institutions, for example, often reproduce caste hierarchies through exclusion, discrimination, and cultural dominance. Welfare institutions designed for marginalised communities can become sites of control and bureaucratic indifference. Therefore, annihilating caste necessarily required annihilating or radically transforming the institutions that sustained it. This insight pushes us to think beyond reformist inclusion and toward structural reconfiguration. It also raises an important question: can institutions historically shaped by caste logics be reformed from within, or do they require more fundamental reconstitution?
“Annihilating caste necessarily required annihilating or radically transforming the institutions that sustained it. This insight pushes us to think beyond reformist inclusion and toward structural reconfiguration.”
This dual emphasis resonates strongly with African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of slavery and democracy developed in the book, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois argued that the abolition of slavery was incomplete because it failed to fully democratise American society. The destruction of slavery as an institution was not matched by the creation of social, economic, and political structures that could sustain freedom and equality for formerly enslaved people. As a result, new forms of domination such as segregation and racial violence emerged to replace slavery. Abolition democracy, for Du Bois, required both the dismantling of oppressive institutions and the construction of new egalitarian ones.
Contemporary abolitionist discourse, developed further by Angela Davis and popularised by Black feminist scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, builds on this insight, stressing how prisons, for example, replicate the racial violence and discipline originally devised during plantation slavery. In the formulation of Davis and Gilmore, abolition praxis involves tracing the enduring links between plantation slavery and contemporary regimes of policing and imprisonment. They argue that today’s carceral state perpetuates racialised forms of control, discipline, and violence rooted in slavery, a critique that has been powerfully echoed and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement. Abolition, in this framework, is not merely about eliminating prisons but about transforming the social conditions that make them seem necessary and the sociological narrative that criminalise the racialised communities.
While the term abolition praxis gained prominence through Black feminist and prison abolition movements, the substance of such a praxis, destroying oppressive institutions while building egalitarian alternatives, was already deeply embedded in Ambedkar’s political thought and practice. His project can be termed as ‘annihilation praxis’ rooted in the specific historical and social realities of caste in India. Ambedkar’s imagination of a post-caste society, most forcefully articulated in Annihilation of Caste, was not limited to the rejection of a caste as a single institution. Rather, it was a comprehensive critique of an entire civilizational order sustained by what he identified as a network of regressive institutions—religious, social, economic, and political.
Ambedkar recognised that the Indian state’s efforts such as criminalising untouchability and implementing affirmative action were necessary but insufficient. These policies were often implemented through a bureaucracy that itself remained embedded in caste structures. Institutions deemed central to the country’s ‘progress’ were retained even when they were deeply regressive. Colonial plantations, for instance, were exempted from land reforms because they were said to be central to the economy. Similarly, elite institutions framed as meritocratic, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, were created in ways that sidelined affirmative action in the name of national progress.
The rise of private institutions under neoliberal capitalist setup has further complicated this landscape. These institutions often present themselves as progressive while remaining deeply caste-homogeneous in composition. Despite receiving public funding under the banner of “excellence/eminence,” they frequently bypass affirmative action mandates, thereby reproducing caste privilege through new institutional forms. The state thus reproduces caste hierarchies through a neoliberal logic of institutional well-being and capacity building, while financially supporting privileged caste students via infrastructural development of such institutions. While there has been strong resistance against the saffronisation of institutions during the last twelve years of the Modi regime, such resistance often does not go deep enough to challenge the deep-rooted caste logic of institutional building as is evident in the way elite private universities are evolving.
The Indian judiciary continues to be shaped by caste hierarchies, where appointments to the higher Courts are often influenced by networks of socially privileged families, and access to prominence within the legal profession is similarly structured by entrenched caste-based advantages. Policing, punishment, and incarceration in India are deeply shaped by caste, with prisons continuing to function in institutionally segregated ways. As a result, institutions that were meant to ensure justice for Dalits could reproduce the very inequalities they were designed to eliminate. This highlights a central concern of abolition praxis, that oppressive logics can persist within reformed institutions unless those institutions are fundamentally transformed. This caste-encompassed carceral and penal systems parallel the racialised system in the United States that abolitionist movements actively challenge.
In his last speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar declared: “we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which means elevation for some and degradation for others…..Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many.” In the context of India’s institutions, equality must be continually aspired to and ensured through anti-caste democratisation. For Ambedkar, political democracy would be endangered if social democracy is neglected. In other words, those who endanger social democracy are anti-national, for they stand against building a country based on liberty, equality, and fraternity. To sustain democracy, one must follow Ambedkar’s annihilation praxis, that is to abolish institutions that carry the legacy of caste system in the very process of annihilating caste, and vice versa.