SC ruling on property puts the spotlight back on the wealth distribution debate | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The judgment of a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in which the Supreme Court held that the concept of ‘material resources’ of the community cannot be extended to properties of private citizens, has once again shone the spotlight on the debate shine that raged during this year’s Lok Sabha elections.
In the run-up to the campaign, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pitched ‘jitni aabadi, utna haq’, which provided for fair distribution of communal goods among different castes based on their respective shares in the population, to be determined through a caste-wise summary.
His colleague Sam Pitroda also spoke approvingly of the ‘inheritance tax’ in the US, in which more than half of the wealth of the rich is transferred to the government after their death. “That’s an interesting law. It says you have amassed wealth in your generation and now you’re leaving. You have to leave your wealth to the public, not all of it, but half of it, which sounds fair to me,” Pitroda had said while pointing to the absence of a similar law in India.
This led to a battle with the BJP, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi rejecting Congress’s pleas for wealth redistribution. At public meetings, he asserted that the proposal should be read along with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s thesis on minorities, especially Muslims, having the first right to national resources, which he said was a disguised exercise of vote bank politics. Congress refuted the accusation.
The government’s position in court focused on drawing a distinction between a welfare state and the Marxist view that the community has the right to acquire the assets of individual citizens because of its version of “greater good.”
“In essence, the Court has held that, although Article 39(b) provides for the distribution of material resources of the community for the common good, it would be dangerous to assume that such provisions allow the entire national wealth to be commute by adding up the wealth of each citizen. and divide it equally among a certain section. The court has accepted the approach taken by the Union government and the Maharashtra government,” a government source explained.
A broader conception of what constitutes the material resources of the community and whether this should extend to limiting or even nullifying the right to private property has been the source of much legal struggle between the judiciary and an executive, influenced by the socialist pattern of community ownership of resources and the idea that the interests of the community take precedence over those of the individual citizen. The idea lost its luster after the collapse of the Soviet Union and with China’s embrace of markets and the economic liberalization pursued by successive governments in India in the early 1990s.
It was after a long period of time that the issue figured in the political discourse, and Congress embraced it in the run-up to the campaign.