Gandhi held Congress alone could legitimately speak for all Indians

Evidence

I know that many have been angry with me for claiming an exclusive right for the Congress to speak for the people of India as a whole. It is not an arrogant pretension. It is explicit in the first article of the Congress. It wants and works for independence for the whole of India. It speaks neither for majority nor minority. It seeks to represent all Indians without any distinction. Therefore those who oppose it should not count, if the claim for independence is admitted. Those who support the claim simply give added strength to the Congress claim … In other words and in reality, so far as India is concerned, there can only be political parties and no majority or minority communities. The cry of the tyranny of the majority is a fictitious cry. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1299

Categorization

• XREF: This doctrine that a nationalist movement subsumes internal minority claims prefigures majority-minority dynamics analyzed in later independence movements worldwide.
• DEEPTHINKING: Gandhi’s argument that universalist claims make minority representation ficticious inverts the liberal logic of minority protection - the universalist ‘whole’ absorbs and dissolves the particular.
• SEED: The logic that ‘those who oppose us should not count’ as an argumentative structure recurs across nationalist and religious movements - possible essay comparing Gandhi’s Congress claim to other universalist exclusion moves.