"What the finance minister has done is give petty, and usually corrupt, officials the right to march into your home or mine and take it over if according to his assessment, we haven’t paid enough taxes….we never before had a Finance Minister who believes he has the fundamental right to trample upon our rights in the name of tax collection. The most they did in the past was ‘raid’ those they suspected of evading taxes. A barbaric enough practice in a country that fancies itself as civilised, but baby stuff compared to what Chidambaram now orders his goons to do….the Finance Minister has also decided that tax inspectors will be held responsible if they fail to ‘attach’ in advance the property of a possible defaulter. Draconian is too mild a word for what the Finance Minister is up to, but we must remember that this is the man who once gave us TADA and the Defamation Bill. There are other reasons to fight for our right to property, and they concern the poorest of the poor. Because Indians do not have the right to own property, policemen and municipal officials routinely confiscate and destroy property belonging to pavement hawkers, rickshawallahs and streetchildren. These are people who constitute what our politicians like to call the ‘weakest sections’ of the society, so let us have no qualms in acknowledging that the Prime Minister’s move to introduce reservations for ‘weaker sections’ in private companies is for political and not compassionate reasons. Had any Prime Minister one ounce of compassion for the ‘weaker sections’, he would have arrested officials and policemen who steal from pavement hawkers and rickshawallahs….Meanwhile, I have a proposition for P Chidambaram. If he insists on going ahead with the mad idea, then let us begin in Parliament. Let every Member of Parliament’s declaration of assets be scrutinised not just by the Finance Ministry’s unreliable policemen but us. Let us find out how men who began their career in politics with a few hundred rupees to their name became owners of lakhs and crores worth of assets. I am willing to bet that men who have declared themselves worth only a couple of lakhs will be wearing watches that cost more than that. Let us set up a citizen’s tribunal before which the MPs can appear and have their assets publicly scrutinised. Let us ask them the sort of questions tax inspectors ask when they barge into people’s homes: How much is that shawl, that pair of shoes, that bangle for? Who paid for these things? Where are the bills? Can you prove they were heirlooms? If not, we hereby attach your property. If our elected representatives are prepared to go through with this kind of exercise and if our ministers and wives also come forward to explain how they acquired their crores worth of assets, then it would be fair for the Finance Minister to go ahead with the draconian new measures. Otherwise, it is time he woke up to the reality that India is no longer an economic dictatorship, and can never be. All he will achieve through his madcap schemes is to widen the roads of corruption. The only people who must be thrilled by his new measures are the tax inspectors. Does P Chidambaram not understand this?"