It is not my case that taxes are unnecessary. We need a government to maintain law and order, to protect individual rights and so on, but our government is a bloated beast that goes far beyond that. Rajiv Gandhi once said that only 15 paise of every rupee that the government spent reached its intended recipient, and the Planning Commission later found him to be optimistic. More than 90% of our taxes are probably wasted— middle-class people such as the readers of this article may not feel the pinch (unless we fantasize about what we could have done with that money), but think of our maidservants and sabzi sellers, whose every purchase feels the weight of government greed. The salt tax Gandhi protested was no worse.
Freedom for a country should mean every person being free to live their lives as they please, as long as they do not interfere with the similar freedoms of others. But our mai-baap state has long treated us as subjects, not citizens, and these freedoms have been denied to us.
Take trade, for example. When two people make a transaction, they only do so because both are better off. Prosperity is the result of a chain of such win-win transactions between people profiting by fulfilling each other’s needs. But Jawaharlal Nehru once described profit as a “dirty word”, and gave in to the fatal conceit, to use Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, of imagining that the economy, and the lives of people, could be planned.
Given India’s natural strengths, we should have excelled in labour-intensive manufacture and been a manufacturing superpower, but the licence-and-inspection raj and our labour laws did not allow that to happen. The draconian restrictions on economic freedom introduced by Nehru and strengthened by Indira Gandhi meant that entrenched big businesses were protected from competition and cronies of the government enriched themselves. Despite some liberalization, most of these shackles still exist, and much of our country remains poor.
The benefits of economic freedom are unintuitive, and popular outrage has rarely been expressed on its behalf. But what about personal freedom? The Indian Penal Code—drafted by our imperial overlords in the 19th century to keep us, natives, in place, and tailored on Victorian morality—is filled with archaic laws that should have been repealed 60 years ago. Section 377 effectively outlaws homosexuality. Section 295(a), that makes it illegal to “outrage religious feelings”, is routinely used by bigots from all religions to stifle free expression. It is filled with laws that criminalize the act of giving offence, outlaw victimless crimes and treat women as the property of men.
Our Constitution, written by freedom fighters, allows caveats to free speech such as “public order” and “decency and morality” that are open to the interpretation of babus and judges. This has led to a culture of censorship and banning that spreads across the arts, as if Indian adults are in a special class of imbecility and must be told what to think. Perhaps that is indeed so, for why else would we not feel aggrieved at that notion?