Opinion Cheap souvenirs
A toshakhana reveals bizarrely cut-price gifts from overseas.
A toshakhana reveals bizarrely cut-price gifts from overseas.
The ministry of external affairs has listed gifts received overseas by Indian officials and politicians since last summer, complete with their valuation by an official of the Central Board of Excise and Customs. While transparency is laudable, it can be bizarre in excess: the items in the MEA’s toshakhana include absurdities like Cartier cufflinks valued at Rs 1,000 and a pearl necklace worth Rs 3,500. Maybe a few zeroes have fallen off the MEA’s website. Maybe the pearls are really paste and the Cartier knick-knacks are Chinese knockoffs. Maybe our representatives overseas are being short-changed by their hosts, like careless tourists are ripped off by the natives.
But if not, we want to know how to get at these cheap deals, too. The teeming millions want to know how to get jewellery at the price of kitchenware and carpets at the price of rugs. And we want to be assessed for taxes by the same liberal standards with which these goods were valued. The popular suspicion that the government is diddling taxpayers could prove to be well founded, a tax holiday decades long could be declared and we could celebrate with cheap shots from a bottle of Red Label worth Rs 800. Yes, this too is listed among the receipts of the toshakhana.
In addition, since these absurdities were spawned by a customs official, international travellers could legitimately demand similarly liberal duty cuts on arrival at an Indian airport. They under report anyway, of course, declaring that their baggage is of “no commercial value”, even if it includes plasma TVs and an ocean of Scotch. Ironically, that phrase is tagged to many items in the toshakhana. So who learnt from whom, the government from the citizen, or was it the other way round? Will we ever know?
Share
