Mahatma And Bodhisattva With Satellites: Why Industrialisation Alone Cannot Annihilate Caste

The discourse surrounding the socio-economic-cultural future of India often finds itself polarised between the proponents of rapid, large-scale industrialisation and the perceived defenders of a stagnant, pre-industrial past. The well-argued and deeply perceptive article 'Build That Factory: The Path to Hindu Convergence Is Not Pre-Industrial Nostalgia' attempts to resolve this tension by asserting that the 'factory'- the quintessential symbol of mass industrialisation- is the primary engine of Hindu civilisational convergence and social modernisation.

Part-I Re-evaluation of Gandhi: Ludditism or Proto-Ecological Futurism?

A recurring trope in contemporary Indian economic commentary is the dismissal of Gandhiji’s skepticism toward machinery as a form of unthinking Ludditism or romantic pre-industrialism. The target article also reflects this view by implying that any move away from the 'factory' is a potential retreat into a dark past.

However, a more in-depth analysis of Gandhian thought reveals that his opposition was not directed at technology in the abstract, but at 'machinism'- the specific socio-technical arrangement of colonial tech-centralisation and extraction, and the mass displacement of humanity that characterised the classical West-centric industrial revolution.

Re-framing the Charkha and the Cow as Process Technologies

To understand Gandhi’s critique, one must move beyond a literalist reading of his symbols. The spinning wheel (Charkha) and the cow were not merely nostalgic artefacts; they were deep metaphors for universal-centric, transparent, and decentralised process-technologies and worldviews.

In the Gandhian framework, a technology is judged not just by its output, but by its impact on the agency of the individual and the stability of the local ecosystem. The Charkha represented the return of the means of production to the household, effectively bypassing the exploitative mediation of the centralised factory that required the uprooting of labourers from their traditional milieus.

Similarly, the Gandhian emphasis on the cow and the village economy was an early articulation of what modern ecologists call the soil-nutrient cycle or the circular economy. By integrating animal husbandry with organic agriculture and localised artisanal production, Gandhi envisioned a system that was high-autonomy and low-entropy.

This was not a rejection of science but an attempt to ground technology in a 'non-anthropocentric ethic'. While the industrial factory views nature as a passive resource to be strip-mined for 'Artha' (wealth), the Gandhian model views the environment as a living system with intrinsic value, where humans are stewards rather than masters.

The Obsolescence of Centralised Industrialism

In this context, framework of energy-centric civilizational waves that futurologist Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) provides a crucial lens for understanding Gandhi.

The First Wave was agrarian; the Second Wave was industrial, characterized by mass standardisation, specialisation, synchronisation, centralisation, maximisation, and capital-concentration. The factory was the engine of this Second Wave, necessitating the creation of massive urban centres, the break-up of the multi-generational family, and the alienation of the 'producer' from the 'consumer'.

The Third Wave, however, is defined by 'de-massification' and 'de-centralisation'. Today’s advanced technologies do not require the concentration of labour in a single geographic location. The rise of the electronic cottage, where high-value work is performed in decentralised, home-based or village-based nodes, represents a return to the integrated life of the prosumer (producer-consumer) that Gandhiji foresaw in his own way, but with the added power of global connectivity.

'Gandhi with Satellites': High Technology in the Service of Swaraj

In this Tofflerian 'Third Wave' paradigm, digital tools naturally facilitate the decentralization of production and localized value addition without destroying the biosphere.

• Additive Manufacturing : Allows for 'localised production' of complex tools and spare parts in a village setting, eliminating the need for long, carbon-heavy supply chains and centralized mass-production factories.

• Renewable Micro-Grids: Solar and wind technologies enable energy Swaraj (self-rule), where villages generate their own power instead of remaining dependent on a centralised, often corrupt, state-industrial energy grid.

• The Global Digital Commons: Information technology allows a village artisan or software developer to access global markets and knowledge without migrating to a megacity slum, thus preserving the social fabric of the 'Beautiful Tree' of indigenous community life.

Toffler wrote:

Nearly five decades have elapsed since Toffler’s The Third Wave first traced the contours of our techno-social evolution. From the vantage of forty-six years, the ledger of its foresight presents a complex legacy of startling prescience and sobering misjudgement. One might easily relegate Toffler’s near utopian techno-optimism to a relic of more hopeful era, or argue that the developing world was diverted from this transitional pathway into a far more fractured and chaotic trajectory. Alternatively, in the current emergence of an array of sustainable technologies and pluralistic economic systems, a series of movements, though still nebulous perhaps, but decidedly decentralised, one can discern an alignment with the future techno-historiography of Toffler.

Yet, that such a metamorphosis could be conceived at all, that a decentralised, post-industrial future was no mere utopia but a tangible civilizational departure, finds its most profound and gestational seed-vision within the Gandhian worldview.

Though he lacked the modern lexicon of 'waves' to describe it, was one of civilizational alchemy. He sought to rescue the eternal values of Hindu heritage, long-enshrined in the agrarian structures of the First Wave and transplant them directly into a decentralised, post-industrial Third Wave future. In doing so, he consciously attempted to leapfrog the Second Wave, whose industrial excesses and dehumanising scale he viewed not as progress, but as a dark and systemic malady.

Gandhian thinker Kishorlal Ghanshyamlal Mashruwala (1890-1952) who was also the editor of 'Harijan' after Gandhi, in his last book 'Gandhi and Marx' (1951) pointed out the centrality of decentralisation to the social vision of Mahatma. Acharya Vinoba in his detailed introduction brought out the essence of Gandhi's social vision:

Then Vinoba goes on to explain what a decentralised system would be with respect to the machine age system:

This aspect was integrated into the conceptual framework of Hindutva thinkers who followed particularly Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916-1968) and Ram Swarup (1920-1998).

In his foundational lecture series on Integral Humanism (22nd to 25th April, 1965) Upadhyaya emphasized decentralisation. For him, in the creation of the social context for realising the highest human potential was 'possible only through a decentralised economy'. He even conceptualised a de-centralised economic system as an alternative to capitalist and socialist capital formation:

Three years later at the fifth National Convention of the Swatantra Party held at Bhubaneswar between October 5 and 6 1968, the resolution was adopted on capital participation of labour in trade, industry and commerce. M. Mohammad Hussein wrote the following in Swarajya:

One can very well see that in both the thoughts of Gandhi-Vinoba and Pandit Upadhyaya, there is an anticipation of the emergence of a new form of economy which they envisioned as being in resonance with ancient Hindu social order. What was needed was an appropriate technology.

Hindutva thinker Ram Swarup pointed out this aspect in his lecture on Gandhian Economics.

It is interesting to see that the Indic thinkers from Vinoba and Rajaji to Deendayal and Ram Swarup, each of them arrived at a conceptual prefiguring of 'Third Wave' and they arrived from the core Gandhian paradigm.

In stark contrast, the prevailing architectural vision for a New India was forged in the heat of the industrial furnace. For Pandit Nehru and Veer Savarkar the smoke-stacks of the Second Wave were the promised land; they viewed rapid industrialisation as the singular panacea for the nation’s deep-seated socio-economic paralysis. Untouchability and casteism could be done away with strong appeals to nationalism (in the case of Veer Savarkar) or socialist patriotism (in the case of Nehru) along with Constitutional interventions. Hindu Mahasabha even toyed briefly with the idea of 'Hindu socialism'.

A superficial view of history often groups Dr. B.R. Ambedkar with these modernists, not completely in an unjust manner. Indeed, the Bodhisattva championed urbanisation and the 'liberal' air of the urban habitations as a necessary escape from the parochial stagnation of the Indian village. His economic thinking clearly had what could be interpreted as 'bourgeois' thinking, so much so that in his magnum opus 'Volga to Ganga' Sanskriticist and Marxist theoretician Rahul Sankrityayan (1893 – 1963) criticised him for being only interested in creating bourgeois among the Scheduled Communities.

Yet, to conflate Ambedkar’s urbanity with Nehru’s socialist or Savarkarite nationalist industrialism is to miss a subtle, vital nuanced core.

Part-II - Fundamental Spiritual Change, They Sought

Bodhisattva and the Lion of Advaita

To Dr. Ambedkar urbanisation was a social phenomenon. It was no panacea. While romanticising rural India would keep his people in sustained misery and block their progress compared to urbanisation, Dr. Ambedkar was convinced that Hinduism has to adapt itself to the liberal democratic society that was coming up, failing which Hinduism would become a stumbling block to India's development and worse a toxic stranglehold on the basic human rights of the marginalised people. This was the reality for Dr. Ambedkar irrespective of urban or rural settings.

Here strangely Dr. Ambedkar has more common ground with whom he considered as his arch-competitor in ways more than one - Mahatma Gandhi.

For both the change should be spiritual not socio-economic.

But this has deeper Advaitic roots.

Hindu Dharma has to remove the basic riddle it contains. Baba Saheb wrote in the unfinished manuscript on the riddles in Hinduism:

In 1893 Dr. Ambedkar was two years old.

That year Swami Vivekananda wrote a letter from Breezy Meadows, United States to his friend Alasingha Perumal in Madras. He wrote:

One can see both the words echoing the same emotions, the same values. Both acknowledge Hindu Dharma as having the strength to remove the social differences through its spiritual values. Both hold the sections arrogating the religious-authority to themselves as accountable for criminally neglecting this spiritual strength to serve India and her masses.

Then Vivekananda asked the traditionalist stranglers of Dharma in his own inimitable style to disappear while handing back the Vedic wisdom they had been hoarding without any benefit to humanity:

The words pulsate with power.

The inversion is sharp. Traditionalist Acharyas in their Brahmasutra commentaries called Shudras (and they defined a Shudra by birth) as not even a dead body but a mobile crematoria. Vivekananda punched back sharp. You are shrunken mummies, lifeless, repulsive but of only museum interest. Yet the lifeless corpses, the shrunken mummies are guarding the life-rejuvenating treasures of the civilization - the Vedic and Upanishadic wisdom.

Thus one sees in both Vivekananda and Ambedkar the call for Vedic values to liberate society.

Mahatma and the Bodhisattva

Gandhiji also focussed on the same. He believed that the spiritual values hold more power for societal transformation than the economic systems. They treated the problem of untouchability as a problem of religion. More than Constitutional Reform both Gandhiji and Dr. Ambedkar insisted on genuine change in the core social views of Hindus. Legislature is good against untouchability for it is a social crime and a crime against humanity. But with regard to religious discriminations in the temples and Hindu sacred spaces which go on till this day, both Dr. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi wanted a genuine change of heart from the Hindus.

Interestingly here Gandhi did not hesitate to get the help of legislative instruments.

But the Bodisattva wanted nothing short of the change in core Hindu values. Failing which Dr. Ambedkar advised Avarnas to simply get out of Hindu Dharma of the Savarnas. With respect to Ranga Iyer's Bill on removing disabilities of Avarna Hindus, Dr. Ambedkar withheld his support and explained the reasons:

On the other hand Mahatma Gandhi entirely supported the Bill. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari lobbied for the Bill. He canvassed door to door for the rights of the Avarna Hindus to enter the Hindu sacred space as well as the civil infrastructure without discrimination. In this regard Gandhiji asked Rajaji not to take to heart 'Dr. Ambedkar's explosion, the Government's decision and Malaviya's opposition.'

For both Rajaji and Mahatma Gandhi the approach was holistic - legislative instruments as well as fundamental change in the heart of the Hindus.

When Indian communities move from the socially stagnant First Wave and colonially imposed Second Wave into the Third Wave civilization, Gandhi wanted the core Sanatan values to be transferred to the Third Wave civilization. This he wanted to do through a combination of change of Savarna heart and also through legislative means.

Gandhiji always considered the problem of untouchability as a cardinal problem of Hindu religion. So when in 1932 he started the historical fast for the removal of separate electorates for the 'Depressed Classes' he mad it very clear where he stood with respect to the problem of untouchability. The diary of Sri Mahadev Desai contained the following incident.

On the Communal Award and separate electorates Vallabhbhai Patel commented that this was a deep conspiracy wherein the British would rule through a few 'untouchables'. According to him, the special representations to them would keep the other Hindus out of the Legislatures. To this Gandhiji replied:

Gandhian chronicler of the history of Harijan Sevak Sangh Mukut Behari Verma writes:

The conversation between Dr. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi went back and forth. Finally Dr. Ambedkar gave in. He had bargained hard and did not return empty-handed. At the same time later he felt cheated because as he had warned Gandhiji even during the discussions, he was not sure the Savarna Hindus would follow the vision of Gandhiji in letter and spirit. Nevertheless he made a profound statement at the conclusion of the talks.

Even after Dr. Ambedkar had agreed to sign the treaty along with Shri. M.C.Rajah, Gandhiji was not prepared to end his fast. At each and every point, he stressed that the core of the issue was that of religion. In a statement, Gandhiji had informed Miss Wilkinson that the British Government should accept the agreement only if it considered it a religious matter, otherwise it should reject it.

The fast was not about the removal of Communal Award. If so it was then only a political strategy, even an unjust emotional blackmail. In fact, many have criticised Gandhi exactly of the same. But despite his harsh words later, even Dr. Ambedkar agreed Gandhi was sincere in his own wWain when Gandhiji made Rajaji do the lobbying for 'Harijan' temple entry, Jawaharlal Nehru could not see why such an importance was attached to temple entry. He was irritated at the way Rajaji was lobbying from door to door - asking people to support the temple entry of 'Harijans'.

However later Nehru realised his folly.

In his autobiography he made an insightful observation which is worth quoting in some detail here:

Rajaji ran Thiruchengodu Ashram where he took up 'Harjian' emancipation programme and this involved creating a decentralised industrial base. As late as 1973  Khadi and Village Industries Commission , hails Rajaji's Gandhi Ashram as the ' Gangotri of Khadi ' in South India (Swarajya, 1973). The village vocations were taken and they were learnt and done by Ashram inmates irrespective of their Jathi affiliation. Rajaji himself learnt and practiced tanning. At the same time he was also very particular in securing temple entry. He even broke the vow of non-cooperation and took up the case of a Dalit who had entered the temple near Tirupati and won the case for him.

Rajaji was clear. While supporting free enterprise and decentralisation, the fight against untouchability and its root cause the birth-based caste system should go. The latter could be achieved through religion.

While Veer Savarkar was for industrialisation and nationalism, he demanded the abolition of untouchability and its roots cause the birth-based caste system through the change of mind, not the change in national mode of production. Sastra-Adhikara based Jathi was for him a disease of the mind according to him, It would disappear when one ceases to believe in the Sastras, he said. That is a spiritual transformation. It would not happen by industrialisation.

Gandhi possessed a profound intuition regarding the 'Third Wave' civilization - a future defined by decentralisation and sustainable humanism. He sought to preserve and transmit the eternal essence of Sanatana Dharma, specifically the universal values of Advaita (non-duality), into this new era. However, he recognised that untouchability and birth-based discrimination were the most depraved civilizational shadow of by Hindu Dharma. The more all-encompassing and luminous the core values of a culture are, the more profoundly depraved and inhuman its corresponding shadows can become if left unaddressed.

He knew neither Toffler nor Carl Jung. But what he gave was a blueprint to integrate the shadow into the collective psyche of the civilization - veritably a Dharmic -civilizational individuation. That was his Bhagirathic attempt.

The shadow did make a counter.

Why not just concentrate on economic upliftment, why should one bother about temple entry?

The variant of this argument is the argument that industrialisation is enough to weaken Casteism and we need not worry about fundamental root-and-branch reform of Hindu religion.

When the issue was raised to Gandhiji at New Delhi by some members of the 'Depressed classes' itself, the answer given by Mahatma was recorded in the documents of Harijan Sevak Sangh:

This observation was made by Gandhiji around the year 1933. Veracity of this observation comes from another independent source.

In his autobiography published in 1938, Rettaimalai Sreenivasan (1860-1945) who came from an above-middle class family of Paraiyar community explains his childhood school days in a Coimbatore school:

This shows that economic upliftment in itself cannot change the situation for Scheduled Communities.

Rather than acting as a universal solvent for caste, industrialisation often served as a new vessel for it. As the Scheduled Communities and caste communities workers entered the industrial workforce, they did not find a neutral playing field; instead, they encountered a structural transfer of old prejudices into a modern, regimented environment.

Far from diluting the core problem, the industrial era saw untouchability evolve into more sophisticated, systemic forms. Even in the nascent decades of the twentieth century, the shadow of caste remained so pervasive that it dictated the very architecture of labour- shaping the formation, internal hierarchies, and collective actions of trade unions themselves.

A case in point is the 1921 mills strike in Madras:

The Fragmented Fraternity

Even when led by two devoted patriots - one Savarna and one Avarna - the labour movement remained shackled by the deep-seated compartmentalisation of Jati system. This internal rift was not merely a social disagreement; it was a spiritual deficiency that rendered true fraternity an impossibility. Their divergent socio-economic perspectives, birthed from centuries of caste isolation, prevented a unified front. Ultimately, this lack of cohesion served as a strategic windfall for the colonial government and the British mill owners of Madras, who exploited these internal divisions to maintain control.

Consequently, industrialisation is not an inherent solvent for caste or untouchability. Far from dissolving these ancient prejudices, the industrial era often acted as a new lattice, allowing caste to compound, complicate, and add sophisticated modern layers to an old oppression.

We need to combine all the wave structures and find out the optimal solution to annihilate caste but primarily at least decouple it from Dharma.

A good example is land redistribution. Acharya Vinoba insisted that the land redistribution through voluntary donations by land holder. It was initially successful but ultimately became ineffective because there was no systemic approach.

Almost half a century later a Sanghatanist leader of the RSS and  Chairman of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) Commission, Dr. Suraj Bhan (1928-2006) pointed out to the same strategy for Avarna emancipation:

At the same time he also asked for the scriptural removal of all the disparaging terms against Shudras and Avarnas from Hindu Dharmic texts.

In 2005 Suraj Bhan was the chairperson of the SC Commission. He had asked the religious authorities to remove all derogatory remarks perceived as demeaning to the scheduled caste communities in so-called scriptures such as Manu Smrithi. He conveyed his wishes to the Shankaracharya of Sringeri himself urging that this detoxification of Hindu scriptures must be done. But the orthodoxy claimed that there was not a single word of objection in the Hindu scriptures and that they need not be changed.

But a prominent non-ignorable personality, sided with Suraj Bhan and stated that Manu Smrithi did contain objectionable derogatory references and that they should be removed.  He was the then VHP President Ashok Singhal. 

Here one sees a practical socio-economic solution that has been combined with the Dharmic core solution. Both should go hand in hand. The fundamental unchangeable is the Dharmic solution.

Casteism into Third Wave Civilization

In modern times right into Third Wave civilization also the toxic casteism has entered. Untouchability has new forms. Scheduled Community youths get killed by Savarna mobs for having ringtones praising Dr. Ambedkar. An Avarna Hindu lives in constant fear in public space. He or she could be assaulted for scoring high marks in the school over a Savarna as it happened in the case of Nanguneri attacks. A better dress could bring home a murderous attack. While for other communities such violence is an outlier event, for an Avarna living a life without casteist violence is an outlier event.

The immediate reasons may be secular. A vengeance, an anger, a conflict in school, college or workplace. But the deeper reason is the lack of Hindu fraternity. The deeper cause is spiritual. How does a national unity arise? Bodhisattva Ambedkar explains:

The inability of Savarna Hindus to feel the injustice imposed by their Varna system upon Avarna Hindus is not because of social situations. The social situations either increase of decrease the feeling of pain but the inability is a spiritual deficiency. That the very learned and very pious Savarna Dharmacharyas perpetuate such a system of injustice, is not the failure of those leaders but the failure of the Savarna Dharma system. With such spiritual deficiency the system ceases to be Dharmic. It becomes Adharmic.

That is why both the Mahatma and the Bodhisattva saw the shadow engulfing the Dharmic soul of the Rashtra. Dr. Ambedkar migrated out of the devouring shadow into Dhamma.

Mahatma Gandhi forged an unified frontal assault on the devouring system.

What we need today is a combined, all out attack on casteism - not rhetorical but systemic and fundamental.

Whenever the discourse turns toward the persistence of caste, the reflexive response from Savarna Hindus is a pivot to the perceived injustice of reservations. Yet, this is a profound misapprehension of the mechanism. Reservations are not a form of state-sponsored entitlement; they are a civilizational restitution - a necessary, intra-Dharmic settlement of an ancestral debt, a collective integration of the Shadow of casteism for civilizational individuation.

They represent a late and limited attempt at representative pluralism, born of the need to counter a much older, far more absolute form of reservation that has long choked the cultural and spiritual spheres where merit alone should have reigned.

The prevailing grievance among the privileged is that seventy years of affirmative action have compromised excellence and institutionalised mediocrity. Yet, if a few decades of secular quotas are claimed to have eroded national merit, one must confront a far more staggering logic: what has a millennium of exclusive, hereditary reservation done to the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the Sanatana domain?

The consequences of this ancient monopoly are not hidden; they are manifest in the social literacy of our leadership. Today, one finds that an average Catholic priest often possesses a far more nuanced understanding of contemporary ethical crises- ranging from infant mortality rates to the existential threat of climate change- than many a venerable Sankaracharya. While the former is trained to engage with the world’s suffering, the latter’s vision remains frequently entombed in a social vacuum, preserved by a system that rewards lineage over lived wisdom.

Not long ago, in 1933 soon after Poona pact was signed between Mahatma and Bodhisattva, Sanghatanist Hindus organised a conference in Bombay. There the Sanghatanist Hindu leaders passed the following resolution:

To eradicate the scourge of untouchability, Hindu Sanghatanists must direct their efforts toward its civilizational fountainhead - the systematic segregation in the traditional Vedapadasalas. While social discrimination is a visible malignancy, it is the untouchability in the root of traditional Vedic education that provides the spiritual scaffolding for casteism. Until this core untouchability of the sanctum and the palm leaves is dismantled, all other reforms remain merely superficial.

This spiritual blockade was precisely why the Sanghtanacharya, Veer Savarkar, identified Vedoktabandi - the prohibition of Vedic study and recital- as one of the seven shackles binding the Hindu community. To truly heal the thorn in the heart of Savarkar’s Sanghatan vision, a resolute Hindu Government must ensure that every Veda Padasala complies with desegregation and universal Hindu admission.

The State must exercise its authority to remove the historical injustice placed at the root of Hindu Dharma. While issues like inter-dining (Roti) and inter-marriage (Beti) address the symptoms of division, opening the doors of the Padasalas addresses the cause.

True social integration is impossible as long as the source of spiritual authority remains closed based on birth. By democratising the Vedic institutions, we do not merely reform Hindu society; we unify it at its most fundamental level, ensuring that the light of the ancient wisdom belongs to every Hindu equally.

To the traditionalists who oppose one always give the famous answer of Sanghtanacharya Swantra Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar: