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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
24 comments
Read more