In early 2026, the world witnessed something remarkable. At the recently concluded ‘India AI Impact Summit’ in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed leaders from over fifty nations with words that cut through a decade of Silicon Valley supremacism. “Some people see fear in AI, but Bharat sees fortune and future in it. The real question today is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it,” said PM Modi.
These words were not mere political rhetoric. They were a civilisational declaration. They announced, quietly but unmistakably, that a billion-year-old culture built on Dharma, on righteous order, on the flourishing of all living beings, on wisdom rooted in Satya and Ahimsa, had entered the most consequential technological race in human history. And it had entered not as a consumer, not as an imitator, but as an architect with its own blueprint.
In the age of AI, Bharat’s Dharmic worldview is not a handicap but a profound competitive and moral advantage. That the Western, and specifically the American techno-capitalist model of AI development is producing a form of civilisational poison, what our ancestors would recognise as Asuri (demonic) intelligence: intelligence without conscience, power without purpose, wealth without Dharma. And that India, if it holds its nerve and its roots, is positioned to offer the world not just a product, but a path.
Anthropology of Silicon Valley
To understand why India’s approach matters, we must first honestly reckon with what the dominant Western AI paradigm actually represents. And there is no better lens for this than a single, chilling statement from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made in defence of AI’s enormous energy consumption: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
This is what the ancient Indian texts would recognise as the Asuri temperament. In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16, Sri Krishna describes the Asuri disposition: those who deny the Divine order, who act from ego and desire alone, who see the world as existing purely for their exploitation. “The world is without truth, without a moral basis, without a God… What is there but desire?” (16:8). For the Asuri personality, everything, land, water, data, human beings, is a resource to be extracted.
Sam Altman’s worldview is structurally identical. To look at a billion people’s data as a resource deposit. To view land and water as AI infrastructure inputs. To compute human existence as an energy cost. This is not the failure of a single man’s imagination, it is the logical terminus of a civilisation that divorced technology from ethics several centuries ago and has been running that experiment ever since. Monopoly, Control &
New Colonialism
The Asuri logic of Silicon Valley does not merely produce bad philosophy. It produces bad economics. Specifically, it produces monopoly, the concentration of transformative power in the hands of a tiny number of companies and individuals who then use that power to shape, extract from, and ultimately govern the lives of billions of people who had no say in the matter. Consider the infrastructure being built. OpenAI’s ‘Stargate’ project envisions $500 billion in AI infrastructure, much of it oriented around data centers that will process the digital lives of people across the Global South, their health data, their financial transactions, their political opinions, their cultural expressions, and feed them into models that optimise for outcomes decided in San Francisco boardrooms. The data flows in one direction. The wealth flows in one direction. The control sits in one place.
This is not a partnership. It is the digital infrastructure of neo-colonial extraction, dressed in the language of innovation and opportunity. The early European trading companies also came with gifts, with technology, with the promise of mutual benefit. We know how that ended.
The lazily celebrated ‘AI race’ framing, where nations compete to dominate AI, is itself a product of this worldview. Racing to dominate implies that the purpose of AI is power over others. It assumes a zero-sum world where one nation’s AI supremacy is another’s subjugation. This is precisely the mindset Dattopant Thengadi identified as the fatal flaw of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism: the reduction of all human activity to a competition for material dominance, with the strongest extracting from the weakest, and calling this progress.
Two Summits, Two Worldviews
Figure 1: Contrasting visions at the Paris AI Action Summit (2025) and the India AI Impact Summit 2026, New Delhi , JD Vance on risk appetite vs. PM Modi on human agency
The contrast between the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit and the 2026 India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi is instructive. At Paris, JD Vance’s address, dismissing AI safety concerns as ‘too self-conscious’ and ‘too risk-averse’, captured the dominant American posture: move fast, regulate later, and let markets sort out the consequences. The implicit assumption is that those consequences will be borne by others.
At New Delhi, the spirit was categorically different. Modi’s framing, that the question is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it, places the human being at the centre of the story, not as a cost item but as the protagonist. The Summit drew more attendees than Paris. Senior leaders from over fifty nations were present. And yet, notably, not a single Chinese firm was visible. The story being written in New Delhi was distinctly, consciously, Indian.
Journalist reports from on the ground captured what official communiqués often miss: an unmistakable sense of civilisational confidence. India’s AI ecosystem is not mimicking Silicon Valley. It is building something different: Sarvam AI, India’s first fully homegrown multimodal, multilingual large language model, beat Gemini and GPT on India-specific tasks just two days before the Summit. An Indian DeepSeek moment, celebrated not as a challenge to America but as proof of indigenous capacity. As one observer put it, “Indian tech has officially arrived on the global AI stage.” Look carefully at the architecture of the India AI Mission’s Seven Pillars. What is remarkable is not merely what they include, but the order of their priorities and the philosophy embedded in their framing. The pillars are: India AI Compute, India AI Dataset Platform, India AI Future Skills, Safe and Trusted AI, India AI Innovation Centre, India AI Application Development Initiatives, and India AI Startup Financing.
Compare this with the American approach, which is essentially: build the biggest models, attract the most capital, dominate the global stack, and let diffusion happen through market mechanisms. India’s framework is structurally different. Skills and safety are not afterthoughts or regulatory burdens, they are foundational pillars, equal in architectural weight to compute and capital.
India is focused heavily on AI diffusion to the last mile, preparing to become the AI-enabled society of the future. This is not merely a policy preference. It reflects a deeply Bharatiya understanding of what technology is for. In the tradition of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the measure of good governance is Yogaksema, the attainment and protection of the welfare of all people, not just the elite. The Arthashastra states clearly: what is grown must be protected, and what is protected must be distributed (Rakshanam → Vardhitam → Vitranam).
This is the Dharmic approach to partnership: not dominance, not submission, but reciprocity. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family, does not mean naive surrender of sovereignty. It means engaging with the world from a position of grounded identity and mutual benefit. The Arthashastra is clear on this: a ruler must exercise bargaining power to secure the best terms, while linking foreign technology to the development of indigenous capability. India has done precisely this.
What makes this moment genuinely different from previous waves of Indian technology engagement is the emergence of a new class of Indian entrepreneur, scientist, and policy leader who is self-consciously working from within a Dharmic frame. They do not need to be told that technology must serve human flourishing. They know it in their bones, because they come from a civilisation that spent millennia thinking carefully about what human flourishing actually means.
Dattopant Thengadi, whose vision of a Third Way beyond capitalism and communism has become increasingly prescient, wrote that the goal of all life is happiness, complete, solidified, eternal, and unintermittent, and that this happiness must reign at physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual levels simultaneously. A technology policy built on this foundation looks radically different from one optimised purely for GDP growth or market capitalisation.
Thengadi was also prescient about the dangers of uncritical technology adoption: “The sudden application of a new technology, useful in one set of socio-economic conditions, to a different economy in which those conditions are absent may considerably upset the socio-economic life and relations prevalent under the latter.” This is not technophobia. It is wisdom. India’s technologists who carry this wisdom, who ask not ‘can we deploy this?’ but ‘should we deploy this, and how, and for whom?’, are building something more durable than the next unicorn valuation.
Arnold Toynbee, one of the greatest historians of civilisation, wrote with striking foresight: “At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is an Indian way. In the present age, the world has been united on the material plane by western technology. But this western skill has not only annihilated distance; it has armed the peoples of the world with weapons of devastating power… The only way of salvation for mankind is an Indian way.” Thengadi built on this intuition with rigorous intellectual architecture. He identified three fundamental failures of the Western paradigm: its reduction of all value to economic value, its divorce of technology from culture and ethics, and its inability to conceive of human progress except through material accumulation and competitive dominance. The result, as he observed, was not merely philosophical failure but civilisational dysfunction: degenerative disease, psychiatric disorder, ecological destruction, wealth inequality, and the paradox of unprecedented material abundance producing unprecedented spiritual poverty.
The Third Way, rooted in Dharma, offers a different grammar entirely. It holds that economics must be embedded in ethics. That technology must serve human and ecological flourishing, not dominate it. That the goal of national life is not GDP but what Thengadi called ‘Param Vaibhavam’, the pinnacle of glory of a people who have fulfilled their potential at every level: physical, cultural, spiritual, intellectual. And that this goal requires, in Kautilya’s precise formulation, that what is grown is protected, and what is protected is distributed.
