Western admirers handed Gandhi a constituency that included the Africans he despised

Evidence

In 1921, the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church in New York in a sermon called “Who is the Greatest Man in the World?” introduced Gandhi to his congregation as “The Suffering Christ of the twentieth century”. Years later, in 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr would do the same: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.” They presented Gandhi with a whole new constituency: a paradoxical gift for a man who so feared and despised Africans. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 282