Government embarrassed in Rajya Sabha.

Government embarrassed in Rajya Sabha.

The Opposition ensured that the Rajya Sabha adopted five amendments to the contentious Finance Bill, which was put to vote in the Upper House on Wednesday, placing the government in an embarrassing situation.

The amendments adopted by the Rajya Sabha included deletion of the provision that “denied the right to an Income Tax assessee to know the reason why he or she had been raided” and gave unbridled powers to an assistant commissioner of the Income Tax (IT) department. One to the Companies Act, which removed the cap on the amount that an individual or company could donate to a political party, was also shot down.

The Finance Bill will now be sent for final approval to the Lok Sabha where the ruling party, which is in a majority, “may or may not” accept the amendments.

The government has proposed 40 amendments through the Finance Bill.

Of the five Opposition amendments, three were moved by Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and two by Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).

The amendments were adopted with a significant margin, with the difference of votes ranging between 27 and 34 votes.

Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has 10 members, staged a walkout before the voting in the House, where the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is in a minority.

In the 245-member House, the BJP has 56 members while the NDA jointly has 74 members.

While moving an amendment Mr. Singh said, “Section 132 [of the Income Tax Act] denies the right of the assessee to ask for an explanation on why he has been raided and searched. He is not allowed to know the reason. Who is the authority empowered? It is down to the level of an assistant commissioner. The kind of corruption there is in the I-T department, this draconian provision should be deleted.”

Mr. Yechury said, “Amendments to the Companies Act open the floodgates for political corruption of the highest order. There is no restriction on the amount of money companies can pay to political parties, nor do we know which political parties are the beneficiaries. It gives an opportunity for a large number of benami shell companies to be set up, to launder money…Already, we are facing the consequences of money power in distorting the democratic process.”

Earlier, while replying to the debate, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley strongly defended the government’s endeavour to make Aadhaar compulsory for access to various benefits, saying it was necessary to check frauds, including tax evasion.

Mr. Jaitley told the House that the entire assessment and criticism of the Finance Bill was erroneous. He defended the move to bring charitable organisations under the purview of the I-T department.

“A charitable institution takes land from the government, builds hospital on that land, gets an I-T exemption for running that hospital, gets exemption under the Customs Act for importing the equipments… Suddenly, one day, it converts itself into a company, starts charging lakhs of rupees from patients, and the corpus developed on the basis of charity turns into a capital… This is why it [the institution] should be surveyed by the I-T department,” Mr. Jaitley said.

Responding to repeated questions from Congress members on why Aadhaar was being made mandatory for filing I-T returns, Mr. Jaitley asked why technology should not be utilised to bring in transparency.

Source: The Hindu