Thiruvananthapuram: Finance minister Dr T. M. Thomas Isaac has said that the BJP government was abandoning consensus in favour of a centralised approach towards evolving a framework for GST implementation. It was the agenda note for the GST Council meeting on September 22 and 23 received on September 20 that seems to have provoked Dr Isaac’s fears.
Dr Isaac said that the ‘agenda note’, send to states only two days prior to the meeting, had enough hints of the Centre’s design. The Empowered Committee of state finance ministers has always been an informal body, Dr Isaac said. “Now we have been told that each minister has been assigned a specific seat,” Dr Isaac said.
“Never in the last two decades has there been an argument over seat,” he added. What’s more, it has now been said that if the minister is absent the bureaucrats too will be barred entry. “The bureaucrats at the Centre seem to have forgotten that they are dealing with finance ministers of states, and not some vassals of the Centre,” the finance minister said. He said he never expected the Centre to change its attitude so fast. “Now that the constitutional amendment has been passed and majority of the state legislatures have given their approval, the BJP government is revealing its true colours,” the minister said.
Intriguingly, Isaac said that there was not a word about consensus, a word that was bandied about before getting the requisite constitutional amendment. The new rules that have been laid down in the agenda notes “reek of centralisation”. “There is a clear suggestion that the Centre's decision will be imposed with the help of BJP-rule states,” he said. This is highly objectionable, Isaac said. He said the state had reservations on various counts and all of them would be raised during the meeting. “Last time I had told the Committee of the need to sustain the body as an informal one. Everyone was in agreement. But the agenda notes now demonstrate that the state's opinions have not been taken into account,” the minister said.
