GST: After several delays, 17-year-long wait finally ends

New Delhi: Hailed as a “historic event”, the ruling BJP’s twitter account has been promoting the midnight rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) as #GSTForNewIndia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his council of ministers and the BJP leadership will be busy from July 1, promoting and publicising this “One Nation One Tax” slogan for the new tax regime.

For 17 years, the idea of “one nation, one tax” witnessed several delays, heated politics and more. But the time of GST has now arrived. And it was this very BJP which was blamed by the then Congress-led UPA government for stalling it and depriving the country of “massive financial benefits due to the damaging political gambles”.

In fact, Mr Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, had vehemently opposed the UPA’s version of the bill in 2013 by claiming that the state would incur losses worth Rs 14,000 crore every year due to it. His government had earlier described the UPA government’s proposed constitutional amendment draft for GST in 2011 as “retrograde in nature and completely against the tenets of fiscal federalism...”

However, it was the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA government which had initiated the ground work for the GST by setting up a committee, headed by then West Bengal finance minister Asim Dasgupta, in 2000 to design a GST model.

In 2009, the BJP opposed the basic structure of the GST announced by the then finance minister Pranab Mukheree.

In 2011, senior BJP leader and the then chairman of parliamentary standing committee on finance, Mr Yashwant Sinha, had asserted, “They are doing a wrong thing” to UPA’s push for the GST.

Effort by the UPA government to table a Constitution Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha for GST in 2013 faced stiff resistance by the BJP-led Opposition and it was sent to Mr Sinha led committee.

But ever since coming to power at the Centre, the BJP had been promoting the positives of the legislation, with the Prime Minister himself admitting that he had many doubts regarding GST but he discussed the issue many times with Mr Mukherjee. He asserted that his experience as a chief minister, who had doubts about the GST, made it easier for him to address those issues as Prime Minister.

The ruling party had been claiming that GST was never a political issue for it but an issue related to federalism. It has been citing the examples of former Congress ruled states like Maharashtra and Haryana, that were opposed to it, to assert that its opposition was not for the legislation but some core issues like tax slabs, basic infrastructure, including technology, which would be needed from shifting from one tax structure to another, concerns of state government regarding revenue.

“India is on the cusp of an economic revolution with the roll out of the GST, to be effective from midnight,” said Union minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, whose ministry will launch a training programme to certify GST practitioners under its flagship scheme Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas

Yojana to make the country’s passage to the new tax regime smooth and glitch free.