Congress gets tax notices for three more years, total I-T demand Rs 3,567 crore

On Friday, Congress had in a press conference said it had received notices for five years (Assessment Year 1994-95 and AYs 2017-18 to 2020-21) from the Income-Tax department, asking it to pay Rs 1,823 crore.

The string of notices follow the I-T department’s raids prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections where it claimed to have traced “unaccounted transactions” of Rs 523.87 crore.

On March 22, the party had lost in the Delhi High Court a challenge to the search operations conducted by the I-T department. The party had argued that these were “time-barred” and a “delayed action”.

Also in March this year, the Congress party lost its appeal before the Income-Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) where it had sought a stay on withdrawal of Rs 135 crore from its bank accounts.

Rajya Sabha member Vivek Tankha, who handles the party’s tax litigation, pointed out that in the Sahara case, the Supreme Court had rejected the admissibility of third party excel sheets or entries recovered in the course of search qua high BJP functionaries, including a former Chief Minister of Gujarat and a former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, amongst many others as invalid evidence.

“But in the present case, all such suspicious and strange entries have been accepted as gospel truth while reopening or re-assessing Congress I-T returns. In fact, it is a travesty of justice. Also a misuse of authority and power by the revenue (department) contrary to the Supreme Court judgment. It is a case of targeting Congress party on the eve of elections. Where is the level playing field for opposition parties? It raises questions of fairness in the present election process,” Tankha said.

In a post on social media platform X, he had earlier said the astronomical tax demand of Rs 3,567.3 crore in the last three days was in addition to Rs 135 crore already recovered from the Congress bank accounts recently. “BJP must thank and felicitate select officers of the Revenue department for their studious and loyal adherence to the BJP mission of ‘Congress Mukta Bharat’. But they have misjudged the intelligence and gravitas of people of India. The Indian electorate has never supported autocratic conduct. No Democracy possible sans opposition parties,” he wrote on ‘X’.