Agree to Congress' terms, will clear GST Bill in 15 minutes: Rahul Gandhi

Mumbai: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday assured the Centre that if they agreed to their three demands, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill would be passed in fifteen minutes.

Interacting with the management students of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) in Mumbai, Rahul lashed out at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for blocking the landmark for seven years during the UPA regime.

"The congress party actually brought the GST to the table. It was conceptualised and designed by us, by Manmohan Singh and our economic team. Arun Jaitley who wants the GST to happen, did not allow it to be passed for seven years. Manmohan had umpteen conversations with Narendra Modi who was the chief minister of Gujarat but he did not allow the bill to be passed," Rahul said.

Talking about the demands of the Congress regarding the Bill, he asserted that the most important issue was that there should be a cap on taxes and demanded a limitation on the maximum tax that can be charged on the people.

"We don't want the taxes that are imposed on you to fly into the sky. That is the single biggest difference between us and the BJP. There are two other differences...one is the idea of dispute resolution. We are saying that the dispute resolution mechanism must be fair and must be neutral, otherwise it will cause problem in implementation," Rahul said.

Adding that their third demand was not a big issue, he said that the demands by the Congress were not unreasonable and assured that the day their terms were accepted, the GST Bill would be passed in 15 minutes.

"If BJP actually wants to implement GST then they can agree to out points, but they are not doing it. We are the people who brought it, we know the GST will benefit the country and we want it to happen. But it's a deeper problem than that. GST requires a huge infrastructure. It required complex negotiation between states and the work on that has not even begun," Rahul said.

Stating that it will take at least two years to begin working on the infrastructure, he advised the government to begin working on it, otherwise GST would not be passed anyway.