FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 15 MARCH 2007 [The income tax department assessed Khan's income at Rs 1.1 trillion between 2000-01 and 2007-08 and asked for Rs 340 billion in tax. After being comprehensively defeated in courts, it brought down the claim in 2016 to Rs 100 million.]
The case of
Hassan Ali Khan
The past week
has seen a media event – the bursting upon press pages of the spectacular case
of Hassan Ali Khan. It has all the elements of a first-class thriller: a
suspect of noble descent, the involvement of racehorses and a crime of
monumental proportions. It is the press equivalent of pyrotechnics – a story
that a thoroughbred presswoman would give an arm and a leg to get. If the journalist sleuths are to be believed,
this man stole the Nizam’s jewels, and has stashed away somewhere between Rs
20,000 and Rs 35,000 crore in Swiss accounts, whose details he keeps casually
on his laptop. He is a punter, but he
could not have made his money on the race tracks because no one does. He is
connected with rich industrialists and prominent politicians, all nameless. The
police looked for him in January, and promptly he snuggled into a bed in a
hospital. They cleared him, and he came out. Two months later they resumed
their interest in him, and as if on cue, he disappeared. But while hiding, he
met a policeman in a secret location. His is such a spectacular story that some
journalist has surely made sure of winning India’s biggest media prizes.
There is but one
fly in the ointment: no journo has discovered any of this. Every little bit of
this convoluted story comes from one or other government source. Three of them
have been vying to feed the press – the income tax department, Poona police and
Hyderabad police. And if all three think the man is guilty, then he must be.
Just as guilty as the men that soldiers and policemen kill in encounters.
That word rings
alarm bells, for it nowadays comes with a mandatory adjective, ‘fake’. Is it
possible that the official pursuers have framed this man? That surely is not
possible; if he had been, he would have said so. Those killed in fake
encounters tell no story, but surely a man framed of the biggest crime in
Indian history is still free, and tell his to any journalist.
But he may
hesitate. Will he be believed? Of course a hawala operator will protest his
innocence; no one expects him to confess his crimes publicly. His protestations
would only confirm his guilt. And suppose he is innocent. Even then he may
hesitate to confront the government investigators, for such lack of cooperation
may earn him some extracurricular punishment, varying from more fake stories to
a fake encounter. This is why a trial by the press brings far quicker and more
certain conviction than a trial by a judge – and the verdict is more
predictably one of guilt. And why government officials prefer this kind of
trial to a judicial one. Judicial trials take ages; and judges often let
criminals free because of insufficient evidence – or sufficient quid pro quo,
as the case may be.
Such reasoning is
not confined to a few taxmen and policemen; it permeates the finance ministry
today. Last year, the finance minister
brought in an ordinance to nullify four Supreme Court judgments, and made a
‘voluntary’ agreement with ITC wherein it paid most of the money that,
according to those judgments, the government had no right to. this year’s
budget is littered with provisions intended to nullify various judgments of the
Supreme Court.
For instance,
royalties and fees for technology paid by a resident to a nonresident for
services entirely rendered abroad are proposed to be made taxable with
retrospective effect from 1976. Searching for such income will enable the
income tax department to go on some pretty vexatious fishing expeditions. The
ten-year tax benefit for infrastructure development has been denied to
contractors with effect from 2000. The government often collects customs duty
wrongly and is later – generally many years later - made to refund it by a
court judgment. The just course would be to refund the duty together with
interest from the day it was initially paid; the finance act now decrees that
it would be paid within six months after the judgment. But in the reverse case,
if a drawback has been paid to an assessee and is later reclaimed by the
government, it proposes to collect interest for the period from the payment of
the drawback to its recovery.
Nullification of
redress given to citizens against the government by courts is bad enough;
nullifying it with effect from a long-past date is double injustice. Lawyers
are supposed to be officers of the law. The finance minister, an eminent lawyer
himself, should observe better legal morality than witnessed in this budget.
