This expansion of the social base of the Assembly was in part an answer to British criticism. Winston Churchill in particular had poured scorn on the idea of a Constituent Assembly dominated by ‘one major community in India’, the caste Hindus. In his view the Congress was not a truly representative party, but rather a mouthpiece of ‘actively organised and engineered minorities who, having seized upon power by force, or fraud or chicanery, go forward and use that power in the name of vast masses with whom they have long since lost all effective connection’.
