Taxes! What fun!

It’s that time of the year when everyone and his dog is accosted on the streets or in marketplaces by sprightly young television journalists with faux accents and asked that immortal question: “If you were finance minister, what would you do?”

This annual ritual that television channels go through is, I suspect, intended solely for the ostensible entertainment value of seeing completely clueless ‘mango people’ (aam aadmi) — who can’t tell Section 80C from a hole in the ground and who probably make a colossal mess of their own household budget — hold forth on the minutiae of macroeconomics. If any purpose — other than the generation of an excess of hot air — is served by such mind-numbing programmes, it isn’t immediately obvious.

In fact, the first thing I’d do if I were Finance Minister — ahem! — is to impose a hefty ‘tedium tax’ on frivolous news shows such as these. The entire proceeds therefrom will be used to set up a Mitigation Fund to finance carbon offset provisions that will more than compensate for every syllable of hot air so gratuitously generated by such television programmes.

There. Now that I’ve made my first major contribution towards balancing the national budget (and, in the process, given in to some climate change do-goodism), let’s see what else we can do to spice up this year’s Budget.

Right from the taxation proposals to the annual Budget speech, everything has become so formulaic you’d think a computer auto-program could do it. First, of course, there’s the ritual photo-op with a suitcase-ful of budget papers. (There’s another meaningless ritual just begging to be taxed!)Straight off, it’s obvious that there’s one aspect of the entire Budget process that would be vastly improved with some infusion of life. For some unfathomable reason, the whole process has been made tiresome and boring — unless you’re the kind of person who gets his jollies from an appreciation of the nuanced difference between Sections 33ABA and 35AAB of the Indian Income Tax Act, 1961. (And that’s not even counting the endless joys offered by the myriad subsections.)

Then there are the taxation proposals themselves: finance minister after finance minister unfailingly tinkers with and tweaks a handful of taxation proposals: raise taxes on cigarettes and pan masala, lower excise duty on, say, branded jewellery (cue: throw in a limp joke intended to gratify women), raise and expand service tax, lower income tax surcharge one year (and raise them the next). He then sprinkles his speech with some completely non sequitur quotes from Thiruvalluvar (or Rabindranath Tagore), to signal that he’s winding down; I suspect it’s intended as a wake-up call to such of his parliamentarian colleagues who couldn’t keep their eyes open through the speech.

The cruel irony is that the process of levying — and paying — taxes or getting tax credits needn’t be so utterly boring. Down the ages, rulers and finance ministers have taxed a wide range of goods and services; but so oddly goofy have some of these taxation proposals been that I dare say even the paying public had a good laugh when they forked out to the taxman. And even when they didn’t fancy paying the tax, they made their objections known in artfully comical fashion.

Consider the range of bizarre taxation proposals over centuries. In ancient times, there were taxes levied on urine (by the Roman emperor Vespasian), on beards (by Russian emperor Peter the Great), on bachelorhood, on wig powder, on windows and on tattoos.

In more recent times, cities and towns around the world have experimented with taxes on everything from low-waist jeans to calorific food (in the US) to disposable wooden chopsticks (in China, to avert large-scale deforestation).

Other efforts at innovative and offbeat taxation have met with comical responses from a non-compliant constituency. In New Zealand, for instance, the government introduced a tax on the flatulence emitted by farmers’ sheep and cattle, claiming that the smelly gaseous releases, which contained methane, were an environmental problem. The tax proceeds were to be used to fund research on agricultural emissions — rather like the carbon offset proposal I outlined above. But the good farmers of New Zealand weren’t amused, and mailed parcels of sheep and cow manure to lawmakers to protest the ‘flatulence tax’.

So, really, the only thing that limits Pranab-da’s efforts at balancing the budget — which he’s outlined as one of his top priorities — is his own imagination. If he can find a way to make his Budget speech and his taxation proposals rather more fun — perhaps even sexy — I imagine he’ll have taxpayers queuing up to pay their due. That will help restore some balance to our public finances — and Pranab-da could well be remembered as the funkiest, most popular Finance Ministers in Indian political history.

Dose of melodrama

Confession time. I’m addicted. It’s not any variety of potent substance that has done me in, but a daily habit which has turned into something of a dinner time ritual these days. The source of my addiction is a soap opera on the telly. It’s not incredibly racy or exciting that I need to watch the episodes with undivided attention or nail-biting anticipation. It is, in fact, just the opposite. It has neither a gripping storyline nor talented acting. No magnificent locations to go gaga over, or melodious music.

But that is exactly the point. It’s my source of mindless entertainment for the day. It all started one evening when I was aimlessly flipping channels.

I stopped when I found a bunch of garishly dressed women with heavy make-up in animated discussion over whether to make a phone call to their relatives or not. The discussion was tediously long and I had to wait till the end of that episode to find out the reason for all the fuss.

The reason was too lame, and the characters, too unreal. But at the end of that half hour, I had not thought about anything else. I had even forgotten most of my own problems that needed tackling. The next evening, I went back for more. And thus began my soap opera addiction.

I watch the episodes with a detached distance — no analysis, no attaching any emotions to the characters or situations. That would be difficult to do too, considering I have nothing in common with them, all coming from a traditional household. The women’s personalities, too, are diametrically opposite to my own.

Yet, there’s a soothing calm I experience at the end of each episode. I get into a meditative state while being pulled into a new direction — the family politics of a fictitious Rajasthani household.

The many faux pas cause much mirth, the outrageous clothes add colour to the scenes and the shallow script demands little concentration from the audience. But it’s hardly a bother as long as it continues to entertain. Like we sometimes walk out of a bad movie feeling strangely light? The daily soap performs pretty much the similar task.

Sitting in the lotus position with the dhyana mudra and eyes closed is a daily ritual that reminds me everyday to stay centred. But the daily soap reminds me that I need some light fun too when I can escape, even if for a brief while, into another world and return rejuvenated and ready to take on another day. 

The women’s reservation bill has been endorsed by the Union cabinet last week and it is slated to be introduced in the ongoing budget session of Parliament. This comes after the departmental standing committee of Parliament recommended that the bill be presented in its present form.

That is, the reservation for women should be pegged at 33% and no modifications need be made with regard to demands by parties such as the Janata Dal (United), Samajwadi Party (SP), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) which believe that there should be a quota-within-the-quota for women from the other backward classes (OBCs) in the bill. Proponents of reservation for women have been arguing that creating divisions among women on caste lines would defeat the purpose of women’s empowerment.

The issue is hotly contested one because it creates a powerful substantially numerous constituency and political parties are aware of its ramifications for electoral battles. And now, all the major parties — Congress, BJP, CPM —are willing to join hands to push it through. The modalities could become an issue. As it stands now,women-only constituencies will be rotated, like for reserved constituencies for Schedules Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The presence of a substantial number of women in the Lok Sabha and in the state assemblies will certainly change the composition of the political class in quantitative as well as qualitative terms. The language of debates may change and so also the prioritisation of issues. These are expected and not guaranteed outcomes. The example to fall back on is that of women’s reservation in panchayats. The record is mixed at best. There were dramatic improvements in some of them and corruption and inefficiency remained at earlier levels in some others.

It would be unfair to demand that the presence of women should work as a cleansing measure in the political sphere. The reservation for women is not being made on the basis of biology and morality. The simple fact is that women are not proportionally represented in legislatures. However, questions must be raised about why political parties do not also look at internal reservations when it comes to distribution of tickets within their own parties. To a large extent, that would make such a bill redundant. For women, this is one more battle partially won.

The virtue of helplessness

It’s now more than three years since Bangalore city has seen an elected municipality and the BJP government, which has never had to deal with representatives from city wards, would like to maintain the status quo. It stands to reason.

Unseen bodies in the unseen corridors of power are moving secret files seeking sanction of thousands of crores of rupees to be spent on infrastructure projects in Bangalore and to get democracy into the story is simply asking for it.

When the term of the last elected council ended in November 2006, the area under the old municipal corporation was about 225 sq km. In the anything-goes regime of the last three years, BBMP areas have grown to over 800 sq km and the new budgets come with 10 zeros after a number.

It is true that the Karnataka High Court has lost patience with the state’s many ways of putting off elections mandated by the 74th amendment to the Constitution. The Supreme Court has supported the lower court’s enough-is-enough, get-on-with-it order, but the state’s strategists have discovered the true yields of incompetence — pretended or otherwise.

The courts say hold elections before March 30 and the state is now saying, “We can’t.” You understand, of course, that that is not contempt of court, because that is not defiance, only helplessness. And this has been the government’s trump card with managing Bangalore. It started with the process of delimitation, or redrawing of the new wards under a Greater Bangalore.

It took a whole year or more for the process to be completed for the new list of wards. Then the Assembly elections came in 2008 and the BBMP polls were put off. Now the ‘new government’ had to read and understand the map of the new wards and then the Union elections came in 2009 and the BBMP polls were put off and the courts heard the petitions of frustrated citizens patiently as deadline after deadline for the city elections became useless history — Oct 2008, March 2009, July 2009 and now March 2010, set to expire.

And the government has used the clashing dates of state and central polls with a combination of mind-boggling incompetence, first labouring over the new wards, fixing the number at 145 or so and then reshaping the BBMP map into 198 wards.

It then coloured the map with statutory reservations for scheduled castes and tribes in ways that invited litigation and abjectly promised to do anything the court says. Anything, so long as the polls can be postponed.

It was in September 2008 that the high court first lost patience and issued notices for contempt of court to the government and state election commission for failing to hold the promised polls and it is testimony to this government’s deftness in guile that the city is still without elected local representation till now.

The betting wizards that set up the odds for predicting cricket outcomes must surely feel challenged to speculate on poll dates for BBMP. Not until November, says one opinion: perhaps April, perhaps May or may not. The one thing that almost everybody is sure of is that it will not be what the court ordered: before March 30.

The rules of the game favour the manipulators in the state government because issues of delimitation of wards and reservation have to be dealt with by the government and not the election commission.

So, by the logic that it is always easier to fail than to succeed, the government has drawn the maps and coloured them, possibly by guessing, or worse. If I can be pardoned for being cynical, the Opposition — barring a few exceptions — too is not exactly frothing at the mouth because the polls are put off. When you are part of the winking party, you learn how to pretend to die or cry.

And the lead actor in the story, the Yeddyurappa government, could now point to the state election commission itself which has pleaded before the court that elections during exams are simply not possible because it needs the schools and the staff to conduct the exercise. And there are many exams, of CBSE and SSLC and PUC.

The government has used other excuses too — the census of 2011 (so that could mean no elections for another year), hot summer, cold winter, wet monsoon, power cuts and the budget session of the legislature.

The government understands all too well that there is a rapidly changing Bangalore out there. The nature of the Assembly vote, which this government enjoyed, showed how urbanisation has changed the game. There are new players who are vocal and articulate and, horror of horrors, public-spirited and honest. The stakes are high and there is too much money to be spent.

There is a moral to this story. They don’t want the polls, because the citizens will get the power they lose. Ergo, vote, whenever the chance comes. Till then, enjoy the game.