Do you know how the govt is taxing you?

One of the shortest Articles in the Constitution is also one which affects us on a day-to-day basis. As citizens, we may not realise it, but it is also one that has an ancient history.

I am talking about Article 265 -- the one which guarantees that there shall be no taxation without the authority of law. Only 12 words long, it was so obvious and well understood in the 1940s that it wasn’t even debated in the Constituent Assembly while being passed. That is because the history of this Article is over 700 years old and is linked to the very idea of a Constitution -- a document which limits the powers of the Government. To see why, we need to go back all the way to England in the 13th century.

King John, who then ruled over England, was not a particularly good king, and deeply unpopular. He had waged extensive wars against France to retake ancestral lands and lost, running up huge debts which needed to be repaid. Naturally, he resorted to taxing the landowning classes and the people recklessly, causing resentment to run high -- until the nobles got together and waged war against King John. When they defeated him in battle, the nobles did not overthrow him -- they made him sign a peace treaty and, more importantly, got him to agree to limit his powers as a ruler on the basis of a written text that today we call the Magna Carta.

Also Read | Till taxes divide us apart

The Magna Carta is the foundational text of much of what became constitutional law in Britain. Interestingly, parts of the Magna Carta are still in force in England as law, though much of it has either been repealed or replaced by other, more expansive laws relating to civil rights. The principles in Magna Carta were expanded in the coming centuries through other laws which expanded upon this principle, gaining wider support after the English Civil War, where Parliament established its supremacy over the King in the 17th century.

Not just in Britain but the Magna Carta’s ideas spread across the Atlantic to Britain’s English-speaking colonies. The peoples of these colonies were being subjected to more and more taxes by the London-based Parliament to fund Britain’s debt repayments following the Seven Years’ War in the 18th century.

The taxes themselves were not the problem -- the “Americans” still saw themselves as “English” and had also fought in the Seven Years’ War, but they were unhappy that they had no say in how they were taxed by the “mother country”. Wealthy landowners who controlled Britain’s Parliament were, however, unwilling to let “Americans” gain representation in the British Parliament. This resulted, eventually, in the American colonies revolting against Britain and giving themselves a Constitution, which they believed would guard against the kind of unaccountable tyranny they had faced from Britain.

Closer home, we are familiar with Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha in 1930, which galvanised the Civil Disobedience movement. But protests and movements against salt taxes in India date back to the 1880s, when they were imposed for the first time by colonial authorities. Gandhi’s genius, perhaps drawing inspiration from the Barons of England and American colonists, was to turn what seemed to be only an economic issue into a political one. By campaigning against a tax on a commodity almost everyone in the nation consumed, he brought the freedom movement to every doorstep.

Article 265 doesn’t always enjoy the glamour of Article 21 or 19, but it’s perhaps just as relevant. The GST figure on your receipt is not just the government telling you how much to pay, but letting you know how much it is allowed to take -- in accordance with the law that it makes. Your income tax returns are not just telling the government how much you have to pay, but also for you to make sure that the government is taking no more than it is allowed by the law.