Manusmriti in the Age of Machines: The Return of Theocratic Labour Ethics
Abstract
The 2025 Draft Labour Policy of India, invoking the Manusmriti as a civilisational foundation of labour governance, marks a disturbing return to the casteist underpinnings of Hindu orthodoxy. This paper critically analyses the ideological implications of embedding ancient Brahminical texts within modern policy frameworks. Tracing the historical evolution of labour—from primitive communism through slave, feudal, and capitalist modes—it situates the current policy within the global trajectory of labour emancipation and the Indian struggle against caste. Drawing upon Karl Marx’s theory of surplus labour, B.R. Ambedkar’s denunciation of Manusmriti, and the radical social reform movements of Phule and Periyar, the essay exposes the attempt to recast labour within the moral order of Sanatan Dharma as a reactionary project that undermines constitutional modernity. It argues that the labourer’s identity is universal and economic, not religious or caste-bound, and any effort to moralise or hierarchise it through religious revivalism is an assault on equality, justice, and modern democracy.
From Marx to Manu: How India’s Labour Policy Betrays the Modern World
The recent draft of India’s Shram Shakti Niti 2025, invoking Manusmriti as a moral foundation for labour governance, is not merely an act of historical revisionism—it is a deliberate ideological regression. The invocation of an ancient text notorious for codifying caste hierarchy to guide a 21st-century labour policy is deplorable, reactionary, and fundamentally anti-modern. This move signals an attempt to shift the moral compass of governance from constitutional ethics to theocratic sanction.
To understand the gravity of this distortion, one must trace the genesis of labour in human society. In the earliest forms of social organization—what Karl Marx termed primitive communism—labour was collective, resources were shared, and no one monopolized production. The rise of private property birthed hierarchy: the slave-master system institutionalized ownership of human labour, the feudal-serf system bound workers to the soil, and capitalism commodified labour entirely. At each stage, those who controlled resources designed systems to justify exploitation. Religion, philosophy, and law were shaped to serve the ruling class’s interest.
In India, this process was uniquely codified through the caste system. The division of labour became hereditary, rigid, and sanctified by religion. As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted, “Caste is not a division of labour; it is a division of labourers.” Manusmriti perfected this moral economy of inequality—prescribing that Shudras serve without claim to property, dignity, or freedom. Such laws were not moral codes but instruments of economic control. They ensured that labour remained subjugated, that dignity was monopolized by birth, and that inequality was divinely ordained.
The modern world, however, has travelled centuries beyond such barbarism. The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the workers’ movements of the 19th and 20th centuries transformed labour into a question of rights, not servitude. Karl Marx’s analysis of surplus labour revealed how capitalists extract profit from unpaid labour, igniting class consciousness among workers. For Marx, history is the story of class struggle—a ceaseless conflict between those who produce and those who exploit. In India, Ambedkar extended this logic into the domain of caste, arguing that Brahminism, not capitalism alone, is the chief mode of exploitation. His call for the annihilation of caste was not only a social reform but an economic revolution aimed at liberating labour from hereditary bondage.
Similarly, reformers like Jyotirao Phule and Periyar E.V. Ramasamy challenged Brahminical hegemony and redefined labour as the foundation of social worth. Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj and Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement sought to destroy the religious basis of inequality and create a rational society grounded in dignity and self-determination. These struggles were the Indian manifestations of the global march towards equality.
In this light, the attempt to enshrine Manusmriti within India’s labour policy represents not a civilisational revival but a civilisational betrayal. The Manusmriti, far from being a moral guide, is an archaic manual of graded inequality that degraded labour into hereditary service. To invoke it now, under the guise of “civilisational ethics,” is to erase the moral progress embodied in the Constitution of India, which replaced divine hierarchy with democratic equality.
The persistence of caste in modern India—its use as an electoral tool and a means of social control—shows how little the ideological chains of Manu have been broken. Despite constitutional safeguards, caste remains intertwined with labour identity: manual scavengers, sanitation workers, and agricultural labourers overwhelmingly belong to the oppressed castes. The State’s silence—or worse, endorsement—of caste-coded ideology through policy instruments threatens to undo decades of social reform.
The government’s duty is not to moralize labour through ancient texts but to ensure fair wages, humane conditions, and freedom from discrimination. Labourers’ identity lies not in caste or creed but in their economic role as producers of value. By reviving Manusmriti, the policy transforms workers from citizens into subjects of an imagined Hindu order—a move that undermines both modernity and humanity.
If Marx saw surplus labour as the engine of exploitation, India’s tragedy is that its surplus humanity—those relegated to the bottom of the caste order—remains outside even that equation. The Shram Shakti Niti 2025 thus risks becoming not a document of progress but a manifesto of regression, sanctifying inequality under the banner of heritage. The battle for labour dignity, as Ambedkar foresaw, is inseparable from the battle against caste. To betray that truth is to betray the Republic itself.
Bibliography
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