Gandhi’s Mahatma status let him claim authority far beyond his caste standing.

Evidence

How could a privileged-caste Bania claim that he, in his own person, represented forty-five million Indian Untouchables unless he believed he actually was a Mahatma? Mahatmahood provided Gandhi with an amplitude that was not available to ordinary mortals. It allowed him to use his ‘inner voice’ affectively, effectively, and often. It allowed him the bandwidth to make daily broadcasts on the state of his hygiene, his diet, his bowel movements, his enemas and his sex life, and to draw the public into a net of prurient intimacy that he could then use and manipulate when he embarked on his fasts and other public acts of self-punishment. It permitted him to contradict himself constantly and then say: “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself to me in a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 180

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The passage unpacks how charismatic sainthood functions as a political mechanism — a manufactured authority granting license to self-contradict and manipulate public intimacy — that resists a one-line summary.