With the income tax department freezing funds and slapping fresh demands of over Rs 3,500 crore on the Congress, the party appears to be staring down the barrel of a gun. The tax orders disturbed the level playing field the Election Commission is mandated to ensure after polls are notified. But the government assured the Supreme Court it would not take coercive action on the recovery of the fresh tax demands during the Lok Sabha elections. When a national party like the Congress admits it no longer has the ability to spend on print and TV advertisements, you get a sense of its desperation. The party has since restricted its ad blitz to social media platforms and asked its state units to fend for themselves through crowdfunding. That the grand old party was caught unawares was reflected in Tamil Nadu MP Manickam Tagore admitting the situation could have been handled better had the state units known about the challenge six months ago.
Rahul Gandhi recently said his party’s central unit was not even able to spend Rs 2 on campaign work. That might be an exaggeration but it amplified the hard stance of its opponent, not deterred by its democratic fallout and ignoring the concerns of the US and UN. Coming as the action did just before the elections, the Congress raged against what it called “tax terrorism”. But its timing is suspect—it knew the crackdown was imminent, as the tax sleuths acted only after the Delhi High Court last month dismissed the party’s challenges to the reassessment of the last six years’ returns. The court sneered at the party tactically seeking legal intervention only near the end of the taxman’s proceedings. It also saw merit in the claim that the reassessment was necessitated following the recovery of incriminating documents in 2019 raids, which allegedly revealed lots of hidden revenues not recorded in the books.
That the BJP would not miss an opportunity to choke the opposition’s money power is well known. For example, when demonetisation happened in November 2016, one of the alleged unstated objectives was to render the state parties’ stash of black money useless ahead of the UP polls. But the Congress chose a flawed strategy to fend off the nosey taxman. Had it been more proactive in keeping its books, chances are it could have been on firmer ground.