Ahimsa is presented as the highest Hindu virtue. It evokes images of gentle sages, compassionate saints, and morally superior lives. But beneath this halo lies a social technology that has, for centuries, enabled and reinforced untouchability. People often confuse caste with untouchability. When they speak of caste mobility they refer to ‘touchable’ castes only.
There are two dominant forms of ahimsa in contemporary India. The first is Gandhian ahimsa, rooted in political strategy. It rejects weapons, promotes civil disobedience, and uses moral pressure rather than physical force to confront injustice. This form of ahimsa played a crucial role in India’s freedom struggle, but today it is rejected by large sections of the Sanatani Hindutva lobby, which believes that violence is necessary to defend the nation and protect religious identity. For them, non-violence is weakness, even betrayal.
The second form of ahimsa is dietary ahimsa, the idea that those who eat plant-based food are morally superior to those who eat meat, fish, or eggs. This belief is far more socially powerful. It is embedded in everyday practices, institutional rules, temple regulations, corporate culture, and political symbolism. And it is this form of ahimsa that quietly introduces the notion of untouchability and the hierarchy of purity. Significantly, this ahimsa is endorsed by Gandhians as well as Sanatanis. This is openly practiced in the name of food preferences and food choices. If Muslims can have haram-halal dichotomy why can’t Hindus divide food, and people, on lines of purity.
Vegetarianism draws heavily from Jain thought, which holds that plants experience no pain and therefore consuming plants involves no violence. But this logic contradicts both science as well as older Vedic narratives. The Shatapatha Brahmana tells us that even those who consume plants must face consequences in the afterlife, where they are eaten by plants and suffer silently, screaming without sound. In the oldest layers of Jain thought, true ahimsa meant fasting to death: when there is no consumption, there is no violence.
Anyone familiar with agriculture knows no vegetarian meal is cruelty free. Farming is soaked in violence. Insects, rodents, worms, and birds are killed in vast numbers to protect crops. Bulls are castrated to make them docile for ploughing and transport. Vegetarianism hides these acts behind sanitised supply chains, enabling urban elites to imagine their plates as bloodless and pure. Those engaged in actual farm work— the peasants, were the Shudra, the servant, their violence hidden from sight. Contact with them was minimal.
For pastoralists, desert communities, forest dwellers, and coastal populations, meat and fish are not indulgences. They are necessities. Tribal groups such as the Bhil, Gond, Koli, Sabara, and countless northeastern communities have lived sustainably for millennia, hunting and foraging, without exhausting their ecosystems. Yet they are branded violent and impure, while industrialists who devastate forests for mining and infrastructure are celebrated as sattvik and pure. This inversion of morality reveals how deeply class and caste shape our understanding of violence.
Purity has become the central obsession. Vegetarian spaces now dominate India’s public institutions. Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram maintains a vegetarian kitchen as do canteens of the RSS. Corporate offices proudly advertise Jain kitchens. Airlines are pressured to offer only vegetarian meals. Pilgrimage towns are increasingly declared pure-veg zones. The word “pure” is crucial. It implies that meat-eaters contaminate space, that their presence, smell, and habits are polluting. Yet, Indians get upset when the same treatment is meted out to them by White people who do not give housing to people who ‘smell like curries’.
This purity regime extends into everyday humiliation. Employees are forbidden from bringing non-vegetarian food in tiffin boxes. Housing societies ban tenants who cook meat. Entire neighbourhoods enforce dietary conformity. What once was caste segregation now appears as lifestyle choice. The vocabulary has changed, but the structure remains. Instead of Brahmin and Shudra, we now have pure and impure Hindus.
To legitimise this hierarchy, gurus invoke the theory of sattvik, rajasik, and tamasik food. This classification, loosely inspired by philosophical gunas, is now weaponised as nutritional science and moral ranking. Yet no Hindu scripture mandates vegetarianism as a universal spiritual law. The Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Puranas are filled with hunters, fish-eaters, and meat-consuming sages, mistranslations of ancient texts by modern political publishing houses notwithstanding.
When people claim Hinduism is under threat, they usually point to external enemies. But the deeper danger comes from within: from ancient Brahminical ideas of purity and pollution, reinforced by Buddhist and Jain ethical absolutism, now rebranded as lifestyle morality. Together, they create a civilisational hierarchy where elite habits are universalised as virtue, and subaltern survival strategies are demonised as unworthy of touch.
Ahimsa, in this form, does not dissolve violence. It merely hides it. Caste is denied but untouchability is carefully recoded. And in doing so, it allows social domination to pass off as spiritual refinement, while inequality continues, unchallenged, on a sanctified plate.
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