As the political slugfest stretches some more inches around the discourse of inheritance law, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday claimed that former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had scrapped the inheritance law because he didn’t want to share his inherited property with the government.
Addressing a rally in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena, PM Modi said, “PM Indira Gandhi was no more, the property that she had supposed to go to her children.”
“Earlier, there was a law that before it went to them, the government used to take a share of it. The Congress had already made such a law and there was widespread discussion at the time. And when Indira Ji was no more and her son Rajiv Gandhi was supposed to get the property… what did he do? To save that property he got from his mother Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself abolished the inheritance law that existed earlier to save his property and save that money,” Modi said.
The debate around the topic resurfaced after Congress leader Sam Pitroda said that the concept of inheritance law will be interesting to ponder on in Bharat.
While speaking to the ANI Pitroda had said, “It says you in your generation made wealth and you are leaving now, you must leave your wealth for the public… not all of it, half of it, which to me sounds fair,” Pitroda said.
Notably, Pitroda is also the one who ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, had said in a TV interview that the middle class should be prepared to pay more taxes to guarantee minimum income for all poor households, asking them to not be “selfish.”
During the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when the BJP claimed that “instructions” for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots came from Rajiv Gandhi, Pitroda denied the charge but said, “Ab kya hai ’84 ka? Aapne kya kiya 5 saal mein, uski baat kariye. ’84 mein hua to hua. Aapne kya kiya?
Commenting on the latest remarks by the Congress leader PM Modi said, that Congress would snatch properties left behind by people for their children- the party’s mantra, he said, was to “loot”, “zindagi ke saath bhi, zindagi ke baad bhi.”
The inheritance tax was used as a tool presumably for redistribution of wealth to address income inequality. India did have an inheritance (or death) tax once. The tax at the time known as estate duty, was introduced in 1953, and was abolished in 1985 by the government of Rajiv Gandhi.
Comments