Recording his discourse while reacting to the growing incidents of intolerance against Muslims especially against Hijab in India under BJP’s rule led by PM Modi, the renowned American linguist and a professor Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Noam Chomsky said, “The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout India and it is taking its most lethal form in the country where the Modi government is systematically dismantling India secular democracy and turning the country into a Hindu ethnocracy with almost 250 million Muslims becoming a persecuted minority.”
The assault, he said, is taking other forms as well including a general attack on independent thought and the educational system primarily directed against Muslim victims but by now expanding beyond.
Born to a Jewish immigrant family in Philadelphia, the 94 years old celebrated philosopher Avram Noam Chomsky has come a long way from developing a passion for anarchism to a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic and a political activist. Being a celebrated laureate professor linguistic at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is an author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
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While pursuing his post-graduation in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar and won the doctorate in 1955. It is this year when he began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while emerging as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, in the year 1957 that played an important role in remodelling the study of language.
Noam Chomsky’s remarks assumed significance and come as a fresh blow to BJP at a time when the saffron regime led by PM Modi is facing polls in five states of the country especially in Uttar Pradesh where the first phase of polling has completed but several other spells are yet to come.
