New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday termed as “lies” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks that former PM Rajiv Gandhi had abolished inheritance tax after his mother Indira Gandhi’s death to save her wealth from going to the government, as it cited then finance minister’s budget speech on abolition of the estate duty.
Addressing an election rally in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena city, Modi also said that after benefitting from it, the Congress now wants to impose inheritance tax again on the people of the country. If the Congress comes to power, it will snatch more than half of the earnings of people through inheritance tax, he said.
Hitting back at the prime minister, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said on X, “Yesterday the PM claimed that @INCIndia wanted to impose an Inheritance Tax. Once it became clear that it was actually the BJP that has been propagating an Inheritance Tax, he switched lanes.”
“Once again, his lies stand unraveled. Here is the paragraph from then-Finance Minister VP Singh’s budget speech of March 16th, 1985, which proposed the abolition of estate duty. Paragraph 88 of the speech states the reasons clearly,” Ramesh said and shared an excerpt from the speech.
“As both wealth-tax and estate duty laws apply to the property of a person, the former applying to his property before death and the latter after his death, the existence of two separate laws with reference to the same property amounts to procedural harassment to the taxpayers and the heirs of the deceased who have to comply with the provisions of two different laws,” Singh had said, according to the excerpt of his speech shared by Ramesh.
“Having considered the relative merits of the two taxes, I am of the view that estate duty has not achieved the twin objectives with which it was introduced, namely, to reduce unequal distribution of wealth and assist the States in financing their development schemes,” Singh had said.
While the yield from estate duty is only about Rs 20 crore, its cost of administration is relatively high, he had noted.
“I, therefore, propose to abolish the levy of estate duty in respect of estates passing on deaths occurring on or after 16th March, 1985. I will come forward in due course with suitable legislation for this purpose,” the then finance minister said.
In his post, Ramesh said incidentally, Indira Gandhi gave away her ancestral property in Allahabad way back in 1970 to the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund.
“Every time he opens his mouth to speak, the Prime Minister provides fresh evidence of his meanness, pettiness, and his steadfast adherence to lies,” Ramesh said.
Prime Minister Modi on Thursday had seized upon Congress leader Sam Pitroda’s remarks on inheritance tax to step up the ruling BJP’s attack on the issue of “wealth redistribution”.
After Pitroda’s remarks on inheritance tax, the Congress distanced itself from the comments of the US-based president of its overseas wing and asserted that it has no plan to introduce such a tax.
Amid the BJP’s attack alleging that the Congress would redistribute wealth and introduce an inheritance tax if it comes to power, the Congress has been insisting that its manifesto does not talk about “redistribution” and that it favours a socio-economic caste census.
