Why celebrate a poor, ill-prepared Goods & Services Tax rollout?

Congress, which initiated the Goods and Services Tax (GST), will keep away from Parliament’s midnight session to ‘celebrate’ rollout of the same on Saturday, July 1.

The party cited five reasons behind its decision to boycott the session:

• Rolling out the GST does not call for a celebration
• Situation in the country does not warrant a celebration
• The country is ill-prepared for GST
• GST, in its present form, is not a one-nation, one-tax legislation
• A midnight session of Parliament is uncalled for

Former Union ministers Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh pointed out how Narendra Modi, as the Gujarat Chief Minister, had opposed GST till 2014 and stalled the UPA government from implementing it on the originally planned date of April 1, 2010. “The current GST legislation has too many shortcomings,” said Ramesh.

Anand Sharma added that GST, in its current form, is not the simple tax structure that was originally conceptualised, pointing out that it is “neither a perfect Bill nor a one-nation, one-tax legislation”.

The former Union Commerce Minister said that with petroleum products, real estate, alcohol and electricity kept out of the purview of GST, 40 per cent of the revenue was off GST and thus it was “a revenue-neutral” Act. “The country is ill-prepared for GST. What steps have been taken to address the issues of small traders, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and so on, he wondered aloud.

Ghulam Nabi Azad said, “The first midnight session was held on the night of August 14, 1947. The other two were held in 1972 and 1997 — to commemorate the silver and golden jubilees of our Independence.”

The prevailing situation in the country, he added, did not call for any celebration. “There’s violence against farmers, Dalits, Muslims and women” but Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers “have remained deaf to all their cries,” said Azad, adding, “The economy has been faltering, the GDP is shrinking, jobs were not being created as promised, internal security has been deteriorating and this is not the time to celebrate.”

“(Prime Minister) Modi is a master of publicity. The Congress-led UPA government had introduced many landmark legislations such as the Right to Information Act (RTI), the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the Food Security Act and the Right to Education Act. However, we never celebrated it at midnight,” said Mallikarjun Kharge, leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha.

“The Congress can’t be part of such a tamasha,” said Sharma.

While the Trinamool Congress and the Left parties will also boycott the special Parliament session, other Opposition parties such as the Janata Dal (United) have “not issued a whip” to its MPs to attend the session. Some, like the Nationalist Congress Party, were yet to announce their stand.