Anything to declare?

“Oh yes,” cried Simi, overflowing with empathy as always, her lips pursed in schoolmarmish disapproval at all those lying people out there. Tsk-tsk, naughty, naughty, she seemed to be saying to the poor sods struggling to fill in their pink VDIS forms before the Dec 31 deadline.

For weeks now, this lot has been subjected to plain, old-fashioned mental cruelty. They’ve been persecuted, terrorised, bombarded mercilessly by subliminal messages through television and newspapers. It’s now or never is the general gist, abhi nahi to kabhi nahi; your last chance or a lost chance. Come to the Great Confessional, they all seem to say, repent and deliver yourselves of your fiscal sins on earth.

Think about it. Never have the great, nicely-washed masses of Banjara Hills, and New Friends Colony, of Palace Orchards and Malabar Hill, of Adyar and Alipore done as many little sums on the back of their ledger books, drawn up as many inventories of family silver, or bought up as much gold jewellery as they have done this past week. Thanks to P. Chidambaram’s scheme for the dishonest tax-payer, these have been taxing times indeed.

Now, I don’t know if I quite approve of all this. I mean, why punish people who have worked so long to accumulate a small nest-egg for themselves? I mean, isn’t everyone entitled to save a little something for their old age, and little something more to bequeath their children? After all, these are people of public standing and many talents. Why, each of their tax returns could have won a Booker Prize for its scintillating fiction.

Take Jayalalitha, for instance. If a woman who drew a monthly salary of one rupee can acquire assets in excess of Rs 66.65 crore within a few short years, you don’t penalise her do you? I mean if she, through the dint of hard work and scrupulous household management, got herself several farm houses and bungalows in Chennai, vast tracts of agricultural land all over Tamil Nadu, a farm house in Hyderabad, a tea estate in the Niligiris, besides all those shoes, the country should consider making her its minister of revenue and employ her to straighten out the national debt instead of asking her to do sums.

Then there is Amitabh Bachchan, known to some as the Shahenshah of tax-dodgers. Does this country remain cold to the many hours of entertainment he provided it with, should it forget how urchins mouthed his lines, and how women swooned over his deep voice? Do we tot up his tax arrears that stood at something like Rs 318 lakh two years ago and must have doubled by now? Do we drag him over the coals and get him to make his disclosures — all very voluntarily of course? To me, this would be an act of rank ingratitude, especially after the poor man has already lost Rs 3 crore over that disastrous date with Miss World last year. Surely he is entitled to keep the few crores he has left over from the Mrityudaata disaster.

Somewhere, it just doesn’t make sense to punish honestly dishonest tax-payers like him, when a person like Veerappan seems to escape not just Messrs Patel and Karunanidhi’s security net but P.Chidambaram’s tax net for all time. Tell me, how will Veerappan make his voluntary disclosure anyway? Will it be by video-tape? How does one disclose the earnings from the massacre of 2,000 elephants? Will the tax authorities accept 15,000 kg of ivory tusks and 20,000 kg of sandalwood as Veerappan’s 30 per cent tax? If the State can’t make Veerappan cough up, why should it tighten the screw on the likes of Jayalalitha?

In any case, taxing a country of this size and so talented a people has always been a rum business. Ask Lord Canning, the first Viceroy of the British Raj. “I would rather govern India with 40,000 British troops without income tax than govern it with 100,000 troops with such a tax,” is what he is believed to have declared once. Now here was a bloke who knew what governance was all about.