Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman asserted that India deserves a more constructive Opposition, as she condemned their critiques of the Modi government’s GST reforms as “ill-informed” and lacking factual basis prior to the implementation of the unified indirect tax system in 2017. In a recent interview, she directly challenged the Congress for attributing the retention of four tax slabs at the GST’s inception to the BJP-led NDA government and for claiming justification in response to the recent decision to simplify the tax structure to two slabs. Sitharaman clarified that it was not the BJP’s choice, nor was it solely the responsibility of then-Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to determine the various tax slabs or specific GST rates for individual items.
