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Our highest tax payers are not top industrialists who boast about their contribution to the exchequer

Pramod Navalkar is a person I like. He helped me draft my appeal to the electoral college when I fought for the Rajya Sabha seat as a Shiv Sena candidate backed by the BJP a couple of years back and, though I openly disagree with him on the subject of culture policing which he vastly overdid during his tenure as the State's culture minister, he and I otherwise share an excellent relationship. So much so that I have even woken up thrice at 6 a.m. to go with him to Chowpatty and Versova where he has set up his Nana Nani Parks for senior citizens.

I also read his columns with great interest because he often comes up with well argued positions on subjects I never thought could be handled so deftly and with such wit and perspicacity.

But now I am about to cross swords with him again. This time over his article in Mid-Day where he complains that the income tax authorities are only recognising and giving samman to flashy cricketers and glamorous movie stars for paying their taxes as model citizens and are not doing enough for the common people (and politicians like Navalkar) who may be paying lesser taxes but are actually doing so with unfailing regularity and exemplary dedication.

In this connection he referred to a recent function held in Mumbai where the CBDT chairman handed out Rashtriya Samman Patras to some hundred odd citizens who were not just the highest tax payers for the past five years but also enjoyed an immaculate reputation. Among them, to Navalkar's disappointment, were people like Sachin Tendulkar, Juhi Chawla, Govinda, Akshay Kumar and Dharmendra who, to everyone's surprise, got up and made a passionate plea for better compliance.

But Navalkar is wrong on facts. I know because I was present at the function. Most of those who received the Rashtriya Samman that evening were neither cricketers nor movie stars. They were common citizens. In fact, professionals. Not businessmen. Not builders. Not movie producers. Not dotcom upstarts. Not even the odd rock star or page three celebrity getting late for his bourbon on the rocks. They were not the people you and I read about every morning in The Economic Times. People who win or lose a few crores in the stock market every day without batting an eyelid.

Most of the people who won the awards that evening were professionals who earn their livelihood through, as they say, the sweat of the brow. There was Udayan Bose of Lazard. There was M F Husain, the painter, who (as usual) did not show up, Rafiq Dada, former additional solicitor general of India, Vallabh Bhansali of Enam, merchant banker, M L Bhakta, solicitor, Bansi Mehta, chartered accountant, Y P Trivedi, tax lawyer, Sam Balsara, adman, Manoj Modi of Reliance. And others like them, who are very interesting people in their own right but certainly not denizens of the glamour universe.

That is what struck me as I sat there. The fact that our highest tax payers were not the top industrialists who boast so much about their contribution to the national exchequer, who sit in the prime minister's advisory council and talk thirteen to the dozen about things like corporate governance and the importance of protecting our national interests. They were not the super brats of the IT revolution, who crow so much about the enormous value they have added to India's economy and exports. They were not the flashy diamond merchants who, we hear, are among the richest people in the world today. They were not the stockbrokers who had a spectacular run of luck last year when the bourses caught fire. They were not the faces we see on the covers of the business magazines. Not the people usually listed among the rich and the powerful.

They were, in fact, mostly unknown, unsung. That was the magic of the event. It altered my entire understanding of who pays the most taxes in India. Not the glamorous page three stars promoted by a servile and often manipulated media but a legion of little known heroes and heroines who walked up the ramp that evening to collect their samman, only to return back to their well protected anonymity. One of them came up thrice, amidst thundering applause. Once to collect his own samman, then to collect the samman for his HUF and finally to collect the samman for his son who was traveling. I wish Navalkar was there to see him. I am sure he would have clapped as much as I did.

But the tragedy is that good news is no news. So the media virtually ignored the function. Those who did report it, deliberately tucked the news away somewhere at the bottom of their least read pages. What was worse, some of them simply carried a picture of Sachin receiving his samman. Or Juhi. As if the rest simply did not exist. It was a mockery of the entire event and that is why most people either missed the news or, like Navalkar, was misled into believing that only a clutch of celebrities won the samman.

The truth is entirely different. Some very talented, very clever, very interesting, very hardworking people also won these awards but because our newspapers are only obsessed with putting out pictures of cricketers and movie stars, they missed the wood for the trees. In the process, the best thing about the event was lost.

The blame rests with the media. Not the income tax guys.

Pritish Nandy

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