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| - Fact Check: No, Bengal government is not paying GST for Muslim traders
India Today's Anti Fake News War Room has found that the news shared in the screenshot is not at all true. The West Bengal government has not announced any such decision.
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India Today Fact Check
West Bengal government has not taken such a decision. Ghulam Rabbani, Bengal's Minister of State for the minority affairs has confirmed this to AFWA. These claims have been making rounds on the internet since 2018.
A few days after West Bengal minister Chandrima Bhattacharya was handed over the key responsibility of the finance department, she presented her debut budget at the state assembly on Friday, March 11. Meanwhile, a screenshot has gone viral on social media claiming that the West Bengal government has waived off the GST for the Muslim traders of the state.
Social media users on Facebook and Twitter have shared a Hindi screenshot that read, “GST waived off for the Muslim traders. Mamata government will pay their GST.”
The text further read, “Mamata Banerjee-led government of West Bengal has made a big decision. According to the Mamata government, the trade of Muslims was hurt by the introduction of the GST. That is why her government will pay all the due taxes of the Muslim businessmen. This means their taxes have been waived. The population of the Muslim community in Bengal has reached 35%. In such a situation, control of forming or dissolving any government is in their hands. This particular decision of the Mamata-led government proves that Bengal has indeed become an Islamic state.”
GST _
_ pic.twitter.com/Ugo6brVhoo — ... (@MilanProf) March 9, 2022
Archived versions of the posts can be seen here and here.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that the screenshot's content is not at all true. The West Bengal government has neither taken nor announced any such decision.
AFWA PROBE
With the help of a few relevant keywords, we tried to find any reports regarding the same. But there were no media reports that supported the claim. It is unlikely that such a major decision by the state government would go unreported by news outlets.
Further search led us to some 4-year-old social media posts that made the same claim. A Twitter user had posted a cut-out of a Hindi newspaper on July 14, 2018. The headline of the story read, “The state government of West Bengal will now pay the taxes of Muslim traders.”
@India_Policy pic.twitter.com/p6fmClaZxn — Aditya (@arallan78) July 14, 2018
The report revealed that the then finance minister of the state, Amit Mitra, had announced some support to the traders to file GST. Thus, we ran some more keywords to know the exact quote made by Amit Mitra on the matter. But again, there was no story available regarding this.
Another striking factor in the story was a spelling mistake in its headline. The Hindi spelling of “businessmen” is wrong in the headline, which usually doesn't happen with mainstream newspapers.
We reached out to West Bengal’s Minister of State for minority affairs, Ghulam Rabbani, who dismissed the claim. “These are rumours which have been spread by the opposition to defame our chief minister. Our party chief has always condemned the way GST was implemented. But claims like waving of GST from the Muslims doesn't make any sense,” he said.
Thus, it becomes evident that the West Bengal government has not made any decision to waive off the GST of the Muslim traders. Although it is true that Mamata Banerjee (http://bitly.ws/show/pgUC) has often been accused by the opposition parties of doing Muslim appeasement politics in the state.
(With inputs from Yash Mittal, New Delhi)
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