FM slams Cong on inheritance tax

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has slammed the Congress allegedly wanting to bring in inheritance tax if successful in the ongoing general elections. The Congress has denied any such plan on its part, but that didn’t stop the Finance Minister from hitting out at the party.

After casting her vote at a polling booth in Bengaluru’s BEs college today, she reportedly criticized the Congress for endorsing a law resembling an inheritance tax: “I remember earlier in 1968 there was a compulsory deposit scheme where people’s deposits were all 18 per cent, 20 per cent. Something was taken away. There was no justification given at that time.”

If such wealth creators are going to be punished purely because they have some money kept behind, India’s progress in the last ten years would just go for a zero, she said. “And we’ll probably be going back to that era when Congress imposed a 90 per cent tax. You’ll probably not believe [it]… The current generation wouldn’t even remember or know anything about it. There was India where under the (sic) Congress rule we paid 90 per cent of all that was earned by us as tax. That’s the socialist model which the Congress party is comfortable with...”

“It [the inheritance tax] directly hits the middle class. It directly hits the aspirational class. They work hard; sweat and toil of theirs are saved in small savings here and there, or they buy a house, a dream house, and keep some fixed deposits. All this is going to be exposed to the so-called property tax,” she told a news agency.

The issue of inheritance tax entered political debate after Sam Pitroda, the Chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress and a Gandhi family confidant, recently talked about wealth redistribution policies. Bharatiya Janata Party leaders lapped the issue up to attack the Congress.