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Oppose fin panel’s terms, MK Stalin urges 10 non-BJP CMs
DMK working president and Leader of Opposition MK Stalin has written to Chief Ministers of non-BJP ruled states, including Tamil Nadu’s Edappadi K Palaniswami.
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Chennai
Stalin urged them to join him in demanding immediate modification of the “un-democratic and biased Terms of Reference”(ToR) of the 15th finance commission, ‘inimical’ to the spirit of cooperative federalism. He has attempted to rally CMs of non-BJP ruled states against the Modi regime close on the heels of Mamata Banerjee (WB) and K Chandrasekara Rao (Telangana) proposing to form a third front for the ensuing Lok Sabha election.
The list of 10 CM recipients includes Congress’ Siddaramaiah (Karnataka), Amrinder Singh (Punjab) and V Narayanasamy (Puducherry), who, he urged, should join him to prevent “grave injustice perpetrated upon our States in the manner of the devolution of taxes.” He has also written to Modi to modify the ToR.
In the letter, Stalin said, “Fiscal autonomy of many states could be reduced to that of Municipalities due to the ill-conceived Terms of Reference (term 4 and 5) of the Fifteenth Finance Commission, which were framed without consulting any of the States.”
Claiming that the two Terms of Reference “will negatively impact the allocations to many progressive states like ours in a compound way,” Stalin said, “We will lose disproportionally by the use of 2011 census data as the basis. We will also be deprived of any incentive under Term 4, as we achieved (or exceeded) the neutral net reproductive rate target long ago.”
He added, “States like ours, which perhaps not co-incidentally have been governed by non-BJP parties for almost our entire history, have already achieved universal electricity connection, road connectivity to all villages, comprehensive cooking gas connections and free rations to families below BPL, well before the Government of India’s schemes were even proposed in such areas, let alone implemented with any success.”
Small panel can’t decide on ‘populist’ schemes: Stalin
DMK working president MK Stalin on Wednesday elaborating on the terms of his letter to the Chief Ministers of progressive states, on the “un-democratic and biased Terms of Reference” (ToR) of the 15th Finance Commission, pointed out specifically to clause VIII of Term 4, which says, “Control or lack of it in incurring expenditure on populist schemes.”
“It is fundamentally un-democratic that the un-elected member of the Central Finance Commission should even claim to judge which schemes are “populist” in any state. Who has the authority to convey such authoritarian powers, above and beyond those of the duly elected governments in each state, to a small committee? This is a Constitutional question, and it is my belief that this term of reference is unconstitutional and it violates the due powers of every elected state government,” Stalin said.
He said, “The commission’s ToR not only contradicts the principles of federalism, but in fact clearly biases in favour of certain states at the expense of others.”
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