Sitaram Yechury: Big Brother ushering in a ‘surveillance state’

The Government says that Aadhaar is not compulsory yet. If you want to make it compulsory, yes, bring a Bill saying Aadhaar is compulsory. Why do you want to subterfuge? Why do you want to smuggle it into the Finance Bill?

Bring a Bill saying Aadhaar is compulsory for every Indian citizen. Have that courage. Instead of doing this, you are favouring backdoor entry. Why are you saying that today Aadhaar is required for me to file my Income Tax Returns? Why is my PAN Card illegal then? Why do I have a PAN Card at all? Why should I have a PAN number?

This Aadhaar insistence is leading to the creation of a surveillance state in India. It is violative of my fundamental right to liberty that this Constitution provides. My privacy is being violated by this Aadhaar.

Anybody with my Aadhaar number can access all details, including my financial details, my personal details, my social details like where I take a holiday, if, at all, I take one or where I spent how much of money. All that is under the state surveillance.

It takes me back to our student days. There was this film called “Enemy of the State”. We thought it was in the realm of science fiction how common students were harassed because of surveillance in the United States of America. We did not then believe that such a state of surveillance by the state could ever come about.

All of us also know that Aadhaar is defective. There are lakhs and lakhs of complaints from people who are entitled to receive subsidised food, where the fingerprints are not registering or not working. And, you want to use that, and the biometric data that is contained in that, as the authority for delivery of all benefits.

I go back to another film called 'The Matrix' where you have a number. It is 'The Matrix', where each one of us has a number and we are all slotted into one matrix. The controller, sitting there, shall control what you and I will do and what is our individual role in society, and if we are found violative, we are just ejected from the matrix. Your number can just vanish.

An Aadhaar number can just vanish and that means, you are not a citizen any more. What are you reducing this Republic of India to? Is this what we, the people, gave ourselves? Is this the Republic that we have given ourselves in this Constitution?

And, you have a Government that doesn't have the courage to come forward openly and say, "I am dismantling this Constitution. I want this sort of an order, a totalitarian order, and, therefore, this is what I am doing." They don't have the open courage. They want to bring it through subterfuge of the backdoor. This is something that is absolutely unacceptable, and, therefore, this cannot be allowed. It is violating the Supreme Court direction.

Now, who controls all this data? Which are the companies whom they have given the contracts and who will actually collect this data? They are the US companies.

There is no need to hack. The company will provide all the details. What is being collected are individual contacts of everybody, through which they can be bombarded with their propaganda. There is control in case you are violative, and they create a totalitarian state which is complete antithesis of democracy.

And, this sort of a totalitarian state, with a control by a master and reducing Indian society into a 'matrix'—who will decide who will be a citizen and what are the qualifications—is something that is not acceptable, and especially when that is being smuggled through a Finance Bill.

Sitaram Yechury* is General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and a Rajya Sabha MP

Based on the MP’s intervention during the debate on the Finance Bill in the Rajya Sabha