Ashish Chauhan | TNN | Updated: Apr 4, 2018, 09:58 IST
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AHMEDABAD: The Aadhaar scheme, by which the government assigns citizens of India a 12-digit unique identity number, could be abused in totally unacceptable ways and should have safeguards, Noam Chomsky, the acclaimed American linguist and philosopher said in an interview to Swagat Baruah, a Gujarat National Law University (GNLU) student and editor of the varsity’s Catharsis magazine, a journal of political theory and philosophy.
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“One could certainly see how such a system could be abused in totally unacceptable ways. There should be safeguards against that. You can see some kind of utility in such a system that would help citizens in their ordinary lives and you could also see dangers in the hands of an authoritarian system that would misuse it. If such a system is instituted and it should be done — it must be done — with democratic public support. It would have to be accompanied by safeguards and structures to prevent the kind of abuse easily imaginable,” said Chomsky, when asked for his thoughts on the Aadhaar system, which has been effected under the garb of constitutionality and democratic requirements. Apprising Chomsky about how the Aadhaar system has already led to abuses and is allegedly highly porous, Baruah said people have even lost their lives because they could not present their Aadhaar card when they needed treatment.
Chomsky then elaborated on the idea of social security and identification systems like the one in the US, and said, “Then comes the question of how it is used. Whether in an abusive way to control people or if it is used to facilitate people’s everyday lives, to improve things they can do, to make things easier for them and more convenient and so on. So those are the two questions that have to be raised. In the case of the Indian system, which I have not investigated, but by what you describe, it seems abusive in both respects, both in how it was instituted and how it is used.”
On Left politics in India, Chomsky said, “The Left in India has been strong in Kerala for a long time and it shows that Kerala is different from other parts of India in terms of literacy and human rights and women’s rights and so on.” The state stands out, he said.
“The Left did have a powerful position in West Bengal and it sacrificed it for many reasons — corruption, and incompetence and so on. But I think it can be rebuilt. There have been times when progressive forces were crushed and they came back from the ashes. American history is full of it. Take the Labour movement in the United States. In the 1920s, it was virtually destroyed, a large part of it substantially by violence. Woodrow Wilson’s red scare was very violent. There was virtually nothing left of the labour movement. In the 1930s, it was reconstituted and rebuilt. It spearheaded the New Deal Welfare State measures which brought the United States more or less in line with European social democracy and persisted for the first decade of the post-war period, in the regulated capitalism period, the period of the greatest growth in American history and egalitarian growth, sometimes called the ‘golden age of capitalism’ and actually, state capitalism. Well, that was the zenith and then there has been a counter-attack and the unions are under serious attack and the labour movement has been and will be devastated by Supreme Court decisions that are coming in the future. But it can reconstitute again. Business classes are constantly engaged in class war dedicated relentlessly towards adapting to circumstances and the general public has to respond as well,” Chomsky said to Baruah.
