The full Monty?

Even in the chequered history of sudden wealth-creation by politicians in India, the Mayawati disclosures must signal a new benchmark. It has been the general belief for decades that politicians amass vast personal wealth, but there was no way to verify that presumption. Then came the rule that electoral candidates must disclose their assets, and this set off a new chain of lies as people began disclosing absurdly low sums as their wealth. But in the wake of the episode involving Jaya Bachchan, the Rajya Sabha member who apparently failed to disclose the details of a small parcel of land bought in Uttar Pradesh and who now faces the technical threat of disqualification for that admittedly small lapse, many politicians will have been weighing the risk of under-declaration. Whether it is this that led Ms Mayawati to disclose assets in excess of Rs 50 crore, nearly four times what she disclosed three short years ago, will remain a matter of conjecture. For the moment, the focus has to be on how she could have acquired such wealth.

The new chief minister of Uttar Pradesh says by way of explanation that the money represents donations of ten- and twenty-rupee notes by her party faithful. This has led a reader to make some interesting calculations. Assume that her wealth of 2004 has doubled in value, because of asset price inflation since 2004. That still leaves about Rs 25 crore as new assets in about 1,000 days, or Rs 2.5 lakh every single day, Sundays and bank holidays not excluded. Therefore, by her own admission, about 15,000 loyal partymen and women lined up daily to offer her the payment, or sent her money orders as a token of their admiration. Given the overall income levels, it is entirely fair to assume that they would do so no more than once a month. That means a 450,000-strong paying cadre. This should be the envy of all parties, not just the Congress and the BJP, but even the strongest cadre-based ones such as the CPI(M). Time to go to work, party bosses!

Ms Mayawati's explanation is not very original; many political parties have used it in the past to explain away income that would normally seem inexplicable except in one unflattering way. This is good reason to plug an obvious loophole in the country's tax laws, and to subject such receipts to a gift tax in the hands of the recipient. The change needed is to remove the minimum qualifying amount for attracting the tax. By one such stroke of the pen, the finance minister will make all his political colleagues think a little harder about ways of explaining away sudden increases in wealth.