Did Ambedkar think caste could be ended without violence?
His entire method was an argument that it could, and had to be. Across a life with every provocation to bitterness, the tools he reached for were lawful and slow: the public assertion of a right at Mahad, the printed argument, the ballot, the reform of the law, the drafting of a constitution, and finally conversion to a religion of equals. Not once did he raise, or bless, a campaign of violence against the people who had excluded him.
This was a considered choice, not merely a temperament. He warned in his last speech that the methods of the street — the general strike, mass civil disobedience — belonged to the fight against a foreign ruler and had no place once Indians could change their own government by the vote. His faith was in constitutional means precisely because he believed a right won by force is held only by force, while a right written into enforceable law can outlast the mood that won it.
There is a real tension in the record, and the site does not hide it: he could be scorching about the pace of peaceful change, and his turn to conversion was itself a verdict that reform from within had failed. But scorn is not violence, and leaving a religion is not a riot. He pursued the end of caste for forty years and pursued it, throughout, by means a democracy can recognise as its own.
In the Journey: The speech that was never delivered, 1935–1936