Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Thursday criticized the Union government’s Goods and Services Tax (GST), calling it the “Gabbar Singh Tax” and accusing it of burdening farmers and the poor by taxing everyday essentials. He said the Congress party has been demanding simplification of GST for nearly a decade.
“The Modi government turned ‘One Nation, One Tax’ into ‘One Nation, 9 Taxes’,” Kharge said in a post on X, highlighting the complexity of the tax system. “Two-thirds of the total GST—about 64%—comes from the pockets of the poor and middle class, but only 3% is collected from billionaires, while the corporate tax rate has been reduced from 30% to 22%.”
The GST Council, after a marathon meeting on Wednesday chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, approved a simplified dual tax structure of 5% and 18%, eliminating the 12% and 28% slabs.
Kharge recalled that the Congress had formally announced GST in the Lok Sabha on February 28, 2005, and demanded GST 2.0 with a simpler and rational system in its 2019 and 2024 manifestos. He also noted that the BJP had opposed the GST Bill introduced in 2011 by then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. “When Mr. Modi was Chief Minister, he vehemently opposed GST,” Kharge wrote on X.
He stressed that the Congress has consistently called for easing GST compliances, which, he said, have severely hurt MSMEs and small businesses. “GST’s complex compliances must be scrapped—only then will MSMEs and small industries truly benefit,” he added.
Taking a swipe at the BJP, Kharge said, “Today the same BJP government celebrates record GST collections, as if extracting taxes from the common people were a great achievement.”
He further claimed that, for the first time in India’s history, farmers were brought under the tax net. “This Modi government levied GST on at least 36 items in the agricultural sector. Even everyday essentials like milk and curd, flour and grains, children’s pencils and books, oxygen, insurance, and hospital expenses were brought under GST by the Modi government,” he said, adding that this was why Congress dubbed it the “Gabbar Singh Tax.”
Kharge demanded that all states should be given compensation for a period of 5 years, taking 2024-25 as the base year, to protect their revenues from the adverse impact of rate rationalization.
Kharge, however, welcomed the government’s recent move towards rate rationalization, but said it was “8 years late.” He emphasized that the government should have taken these steps earlier to benefit the common man and small businesses.