Shekhar Gupta: Robbing the middle class to pay the poor?

The poor are fooled purely for their cheap thrills and entertainment, but the real joke is on the middle classes

One key headline-point from the Narendra Modi government’s latest Budget is the raising of top tax rates for the rich earning more than Rs 2 crore a year. The increase is steeper for the super-rich above Rs 5 crore per year. The top tax rate now goes to 42.3 per cent.
 
It seems like such an awful example of Indira Gandhi-style “soak-the-rich” politics, people like us might say. Many others in deeply pink polity would hail it as an uplifting evidence that Modi too has fully embraced the principles of socialism as mandated in the Constitution’s post-Emergency preamble. Never