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FOR the record: Tahirul Qadri came on TV on Tuesday night and angrily declared that the cases the government is preparing against him are all lies and fabrications. The anchor of the show asked him about the tax evasion charges. “I have been paying taxes for years now,” he shouted and waved a document at the camera. “Look! Last year I paid more than Rs40,000 in taxes! And Rs10,000 of that was refunded to me, so I was in fact submitting more taxes than I needed to!”
I checked in the Federal Board of Revenue’s tax directory, and indeed one Muhammad Tahirul Qadri is there, having paid Rs45,300 in income tax last year. Running a few numbers on this, we get a declared taxable income of just over Rs70,000 per month.
The show on which he made the boast was aired from the Islamabad studio of a private TV channel. The good maulana was seated in Canada, and was live on air via satellite link. The show would have a team consisting of a couple of cameramen at least, probably two technicians in the programme control room (one for audio and another for switching between the various video feeds), a producer standing behind them who would’ve put the whole thing together, and a make-up artist who would have prepared the anchor for his on-air appearance.
In this entire team, the only person making Rs70,000 per month would be the producer, who probably commuted to work in a six- or seven-year-old car no more than 1300cc. Another time we can talk about the kinds of pay scales the media offers to people in key positions, and then places massive responsibility on their shoulders. But this time round just consider the contrast.
For all the pomp and show that Tahirul Qadri puts on every time he lands in Pakistan, it is puzzling in the extreme that he should be declaring an income equal to that of a middle-class lad in the same industry that provides him with the limelight he craves.
Now don’t get me wrong. The brutality shown by Lahore police should be condemned, and accountability should take place at the highest levels. Thus far the government has shied away from holding those from amongst their own lot accountable, but perhaps that can change in days to come if the issue refuses to go away.
But accountability must be a neutral and evenhanded principle to work. One of the reasons I’ve always resisted writing a piece vilifying tax evasion is precisely because doing so feeds into politicising the term. Create enough negative air around the term, and sooner or later everybody will start accusing their political opponents of tax evasion, and using it as a tool of persecution.
Consider, for instance, that Nawaz Sharif himself paid taxes of just over Rs2.6 million in the same year, less than those of a CEO in a mid-sized multinational. Then look at the list of the top 100 individual taxpayers of the country, broken down into two categories: salaried and non-salaried. The top salaried taxpayer in the country paid just under Rs190m and the 100th largest payer in the same category paid around Rs15m. For non-salaried individuals, eg business owners, the top taxpayer paid just under Rs750m, while the 100th largest payer came in at just under Rs30m.
Combine both lists and you have a range that runs from Rs15m to Rs750m, a pretty huge spread no doubt. But the interesting thing is how politicians are conspicuous by their absence on both lists, save for one or two who are not amongst the big names in any case.
Now how is this possible, given the lifestyles these people lead? On the surface this is a very well-known query, we all know our political class prefers to let others shoulder the burden of paying for the state’s expenses. But it opens a can of worms when one section of the political class wants to start using tax evasion as a tool with which to beat up another section. You let that sort of thing happen, and you’ll have a pretty huge mess on your hands but definitely not any tax reform.
This is a purely political mess that is being created, and it has roots other than the fiscal impropriety of a select few individuals. At its core, the government’s political problems grow out of its stubborn insistence to pursue the trial of Pervez Musharraf. I’m no fan of the former dictator’s regime, but I fail to see what good will be achieved by putting him on trial. Does anyone seriously believe that such an act will serve as discouragement for any future adventurer? Any attempt to drag taxes and other financial crimes into the picture will only perpetuate the subordination of economic policy to politically motivated objectives. This subordination has hobbled economic policymaking from the very start, and led to the fiscal erosion of the state’s fiscal foundation, as well as the growing informalisation of economic activity, two aspects of our economy that hang like a millstone around our necks today.
Tahirul Qadri has little more than nuisance value at this point in time. Heavy-handed attempts to stamp out his street following, and using economic vilification of his credibility does more harm than good to the government’s own stability. It would be better if they were able to find a more subtle way to deal with this problem. After all, the only thing that keeps the nuisance going is the limelight. Surely it can’t be that hard to find a way to steal it from him. There’s precious little he can do in the dark.
The writer is a business journalist based in Karachi.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2014
