GST means ‘One Country-One Nation-One Tax’

By all indications, Mehbooba Government  appears all  set for lending its approval to  adoption of   101 Indian constitutional amendment   paving way for application of Goods & Services tax Act (GST) to the whole state. The boycott by National Conference to the 2nd round of All party meeting is all a soap opera drama. With this application, the last post of fiscal autonomy of the State will be uprooted and demolished the same way, their peers and predecessors have been doing in the past.

GST has been billed as ‘One Country-One Nation–One Tax’. The Indian Government wants to assimilate all states under the umbrella of this tax. J&K State, which has some degree of  sovereignty left  in imposing and collecting  indirect taxes, will lose such independence and get merged with the union pool of taxes.  

 It is true that non-application of GST will put our consumers, traders and manufacturers at a disadvantage. Once outside the GST regime, traders from outside the state will be reluctant to sell us the goods and raw materials and our manufactures/traders may not be able to sell their produce outside for want of unavailability of  input credit. Since ours is a 90 percent consuming state, the prices of goods usually imported from outside may also shoot up.

Our State legislature could pass a GST law similar on lines of central law with an enabling provision to enter into central GST regime with some additional safeguards to protect our informal sector. It could have taken care of our special status as well as apprehensions about price rise etc.

But there was and always is a clear way out. Our State legislature could pass a GST law similar on lines of central law with an enabling provision to enter into central GST regime with some additional safeguards to protect our informal sector. It could have taken care of our special status as well as apprehensions about price rise etc.

If one remembers, Union Finance Minster, Arun Jaitley at the conclusion of GST Council meeting in Srinagar, had pointed to the same thing when he said that J&K has every right to enact its own law in regard to GST. But once in  Delhi, he  has changed his mind, probably at the behest of  RSS. He has now directed (emphasis added) Mehbooba Government to adopt the Indian constitutional amendment at the earliest and has cited Abdul Rahim Rather’s  no-objection to such an arrangement when he was chairman of empowered committee to  lay a road map for GST.

Now what is the way out from here? It is said that the best way to oppose a law is to refuse its compliance in such a way which pinches the law enforcers. Government of J&K has already started  on-line registration of assessees to get a Registration Number which will allow them to enter the GST regime. This is in spite of the fact that there exists no law at the moment for J&K to govern such registration. One has not to visit any department or official to get such a number and the whole process is completed on computers. My suggestion is and that is totally in my personal capacity, for all such assessees is to obtain this on-line Registration Number and enter the GST regime. This will take care of any price rise/input credit availability etc. Thereafter they should launch a civil disobedience programme which in the present context means that local assessee’s may collect input tax without depositing it with the Government till such time the Government concedes the demand of enacting its own GST law. Let security forces knock at our doors and shops for demanding the money so collected by us. It will be a novel form of our resistance as well. As Mahtama Gandhi once said  “Civil disobedience is not only the natural right of a people, especially when they have no effective voice in their own Government, but that it is also a substitute for violence or armed rebellion”.

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