Congress Party’s Two Faced Attitude Exposed When, In a first in India, people in urban areas of Punjab will now have to pay tax for keeping domestic animals, according to the latest notice issued by the state government.
According to a notification issued by the Department of Local Administration headed by state minister Navjot Singh Siddhu, all pet animals will now be taxed, including cats, dogs, horses, pigs, buffaloes and cows.
As per order, residents in Punjab will have to pay tax of Rs 250 per year for keeping domestic animals like dog, cat, pig, sheep, deer etc and Rs 500 per year for buffalo, bull, camel, horse, cow, elephant etc.
“Branding code”, identification mark or number will also be given to each animal on code branding or microchip installed on the animal, the order government said.
From now on, a pet owner in Punjab will also have to take licence from the authority, which will be renewed after every year.
This may create a lot of resentment in Punjab, which — along with Goa and Kerala — is among the most urbanised states in India.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Monday mounted a scathing attack on the Modi Government by terming the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ that has hit hard the country already nursing the wounds of demonetisation.
“This GST is a burden on the common man… It is not GST, it is Gabbar Singh Tax,” Rahul asserted at a massive Other Backward Class rally at Ramkatha Ground in Gujarat’s capital Gandhinagar, where OBC leader Alpesh Thakore joined the Congress.
The Congress leader said that GST had ruined small businesses across the nation and rendered lakhs of young people unemployed.
Rahul, who is all set to take over the reins of the Congress in days to come, criticised the Central Government saying that GST will have to change, else the nation will suffer.
“GST was the idea of the Congress. We first brought it. We wanted to implement it with the highest tax slab of 18 per cent. However, the current Government at the Centre neither heard us nor the small traders and made the highest slab 28 per cent. There was a lot of thinking behind GST that there should be one tax in the entire country. And that tax shall be capped at 18 per cent and the least number of forms would have to be filled. But Arun Jaitley ji and Modi ji said ‘no, we will not listen to the Congress’,” he said.
“’If (Congress) said it shall be simple, we shall not make it simple. If you said tax cap shall be 18 per cent, then it shall not be capped at 18 per cent. If you said there shall be one tax, then we will make it five’,” he added, referring to the stand of the Government.
Rahul said the Congress had warned the Government about the adverse impact of the GST in its present form, but the Government decided to go against their suggestions.
On the demonetization move of the Modi Government, Rahul said that demonetization paralysed the Indian economy.
“Don’t know what happened. On November 8, Modi ji says that ‘these Rs 500, Rs 1,000 notes, I did not like, so from 12 at night, I am going to scrap it’. He hit the axe, and for the first two-three days he could not understand what happened,” he said adding that Modi realised his mistake a week later.
“Narendra Modi ji ruined the economy of the entire country,” Rahul said.
Raising the issue of unprecedented growth of a company belonging to BJP president Amit Shah’s son Jay, he claimed that the BJP-led NDA Government’s ‘Make-in-India’ failed and Start-up initiatives failed, but only one company made Rs 80 crore from a petty investment of Rs 50,000 in a short span. “This is the reality of Gujarat.”
Not one person or a community, but everybody is on the streets agitating, he said, adding that a strange situation is prevailing in Gujarat where the entire State is agitating.
For the last 22 years, people were harassed and young men like Alpesh, Hardik and Jignesh started raising their voices against the Government which wouldn’t be silenced and placated, not even by money power, said the Congress vice-president.
He also touched upon the farmers’ issue saying that if the BJP Government could wave 1.30 lakh core loans of 10-15 industrialists, why can’t they give relief to farmers? Rahul also raised issues of unemployment, increasing cost of education and health in Gujarat.
Meanwhile, OBC leader Alpesh Thakore during his speech said that he decided to join the Congress only after seeing the plight of 25 lakh OBC families across the State.
Thakore emerged as an OBC leader post Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti leader Hardik Patel’s rally at GMDC ground in Ahmedabad in August 2015. His organizations, Thakore Sena and ST/SC Adhikar Manch, mobilised support against any move by the Government to consider quotas from the statutory 49 per cent extended to these communities.
