Shivakantjha.org - 'In a Nutshell' - 5: No estoppels against the Constitution: I cannot believe that our P.M. can ever be guilty of constitutional solecism?
'In a Nutshell' - 5
In the Vodafone Context
The prophets of doom and gloom, & their double standards
The foreign experts’ words sans wisdom
By Shiva Kant Jha
April 2, 2012
(a)
The financial experts of the neoliberal economy are waxing high all around the globe criticising the retrospective legislation designed to frustrate the unfair and unjust tax planning through corporate structuring. Indulgence in such wild criticism, and making the Sensex swing up and down to suggest that the country’s economy would go to dogs, or into the gutters, if we do not tread on their lines, are the segments of an old game which the Rogue Finance has been accustomed to play from the early 17th century. If you want to witness how this game is played, then read Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness (1841) after taking a pill of avomin as you are sure to feel nausea reflecting how they worked against people. Pandit Nehru had insightfully written in his Glimpses of the World History (Chap. 186: ‘The Struggle of America and England for leadership’): “High Finance, as this was called, was and still is, one of the most effective of the methods of coercion of the imperialist Powers”. How exact was John Kenneth Galbraith in The Age of Uncertainty (1977) where he said: “The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.” And my analysis of how the global Finance has behaved led me to write the following in my memoir, On the Loom of Time (at p. ):
“We had good reasons to know how imperialism as a most important vector in Greed had worked to our detriment. The demonic persons deify mighty capitalists. The Medicis of Italy were the great bankers in Italy during the Renascence. Botticelli celebrated them in his Adoration of the Magi as the wise men in the service of Jesus. “The painting was commissioned by the head of the Bankers’ Guild as a tribute to that family. It should perhaps have been called The Adoration of the Medici. Having once being damned, bankers were close to divinity.” This ‘Rogue Finance succeeded in establishing good relation on the principle of ‘give and take’ amongst the power wielders and the financiers to promote their common GREED.”
(b)
They shower on us comments which make my stomach turn. They say, as the Telegraph (London) of March 30, 2012 reports: “India could be facing a constitutional crisis, after the government proposed new legislation which would overrule the courts and tax companies for deals retrospectively.” They tell us that the change “stands to torpedo foreign investment in the country.” They pass the verdict that as we see a bleak economic scenario ahead us, we try to improve our destiny this way. They advance veiled threats of the brand once minted by the East India Company which had brought the values to the imperialists to the lowest point of degradation. They indulge in the game, about which we have learnt a lot the hard way.
(c)
It is amazing how they forget what they have witnessed in the United Kingdom itself. The Government found that good Banking Practice on Taxation involved commitment not to engage in tax avoidance. Finding what was done in Barclays grossly unfair, as it used “ two schemes that were intended to avoid substantial amounts of tax”, the Government thought it appropriate to take “the unusual step of introducing retrospective legislation to end such "aggressive tax avoidance" by financial institutions.” The Telegraph (London) reports: “Announcing the crackdown, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, David Gauke, said the bank should never have devised the schemes in the first place.” The history of modern times attests that the Rogue Finance seldom abandons Machiavellian logic and Mephistophelian stratagems. God save humanity.
(d)
Through the retrospective changes proposed in the Finance Bill, the government has taken right steps to protect the nation’s just interest. The provisions would help us a lot to remove the shadow under which harlots and hirelings have the best of times. T. S. Eliot, in his ‘The Hollow Man’, goes to state the precise problem that awaits solution:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shado
It is time for us to work so that this ‘shadow’ melts. The proposed changes would help us to play that role. When we think about the Realm of Darkness, and the Instruments of Darkness triumphant in our times, we feel the need for some institution to play Apollonius so that the structure of deception can melt. In Keats’s Lamia, the serpent, masqueraded the most beauteous girl, Lamia; but could not stand the critical gaze of Apollonius that unwove the rainbow of fraudulent romance. The operators from the foggy unknown corners of the globe cannot be allowed to cause wrongful gains to themselves, and loss to our country.
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