Skip to main content

In Tax We Trust

Slum and Skyscrapers in Mumbai: by Alicja Dobrucka


A few weeks back, when the World Economic Forum was meeting in Davos, some of the wealthiest people in the world wrote an open letter, titled In tax we trust, to their “fellow millionaires and billionaires.” The letter drew the attention of the affluent people of the world to the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor and squarely laid the blame on the prevailing economic system which “until now has been deliberately designed to make the rich richer.”

The forthrightness of the letter is admirable. The prevailing economic system which makes the rich richer is unjust, the letter admits candidly. “This injustice … has created a colossal lack of trust between the people of the world and the elites who are the architects of this system. Bridging that divide is going to take more than billionaire vanity projects or piecemeal philanthropic gestures – it’s going to take a complete overhaul of a system…”

Let us pay more tax than the less privileged people. That’s what these rich people are saying.

Why did they choose to be so magnanimous. 76% of the world’s total wealth lies in the hands of just 10% of people. The bottom 50% of people own just 2% of the assets. The inequality is all too obvious. The injustice is obvious too. To sensible people.

The Indian billionaires are conspicuously absent from the signatories to that letter. In India, the chasm between the rich and the poor became ever more audacious after Modi became the Prime Minister. 57% of the country’s wealth lies with 10% of the Indians while the share of the bottom 50% has gone down to 13%. India today ranks as a top country with respect to wealth inequality. And the system is being tilted more and more in favour of the rich as indicated by the latest budget.

A small additional tax (say 5%) on the billionaires of India will bring in an enormous sum of money that can be used for specific purposes like education of the poor children, giving them free lunch in schools, ensuring their nutrition and health, and so on. Instead Modi has chosen to give more and more benefits to these rich people and tax the poor more and more by allowing the prices of everything from food to petrol to hit the skies.

The world is moving ahead with a vision to create a more egalitarian global society. But India is moving in the opposite direction by widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Modi has been taking India backward in too many ways. Back towards ancient myths and their static darkness. Modi is doing to India just what Christianity did to Europe in the medieval period. Europe eventually rejected that Christianity. Modi’s Hindutva will become a relic in the due course of time. Modi himself will become a gargoyle on the edifice of civilised human history. It’s changes or pitchforks, to paraphrase the conclusion of the open letter mentioned at the beginning of this post. Listen to history wisely if you don’t want to end up as a gruesome gargoyle there.

Satish Acharya's cartoon on the latest budget

xZx

 

Comments

  1. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuFebruary 6, 2022 at 1:06 PM

    I echo your thoughts, Sir ! And this is what happens when there is no fear of opposition, the civil society is clueless of what to do and the same party becomes overconfident of its majority . Time to change everything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2022 at 1:48 PM

      If they don't change themselves, destiny will change them brutally. That's how history works.

      Delete
  2. ArtiFebruary 7, 2022 at 2:00 PM

    Thank you for sharing Satish Acharya's cartoon --a picture paints a thousand words and this one paints the pain of the common man starkly--pitchforks, it is then.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2022 at 5:58 PM

      What baffles me is how long it will take the common person to understand the treachery...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more