https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_India
It previously incorporated the symbol of Indian independence and nationalism, the charkha or spinning-wheel. This is not a sewing machine. A spinning wheel is part of a machine used to spin textile fibers into yarn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel#Charkha
Gandhi loved the spinning wheel, but he was citing the Singer sewing machine specifically as a "useful device... with a romance" that was perhaps secondary to his love for the actual spinning wheel, which is stated clearly elsewhere in the same document.
For thousands of years, women were formerly respected and revered for their spinning talents and skills, in pagan and Christian societies alike: such as the Greek goddess of Wisdom, Athena [Minerva] whose symbols included the distaff; this same distaff was also synedoche for the matriarchal aspect of any family, and mentioned in Proverbs 31, as a tool of the industrious and devoted wife.
It is no accident that, in Romance languages, "machina" is a feminine noun. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/machina#Latin