Letters: A powerful lobby

It is quite clear the cigarette lobby is behind this view that beedi should be taxed to higher rate

I refer to the report in the Business Standard of April 23, “Oncologists cry foul over lower GST for beedies”. It is quite clearly the cigarette lobby which is behind this view that beedi should be taxed  to higher rate, as much as cigarettes. Every year this view is propagated before Budget and I am aware of it for two and a half decades of the same argument from the time I was Member Budget. 

It is not unknown that the cigarette lobby has not exactly covered itself with glory in regard to its stand on the relation between smoking cigarette and cancer. If one reads the most famous book on cancer called “The emperor of all maladies” by Siddhatha Mukherjee one will know how the cigarette lobby had been successfully spreading misinformation that cigarette smoking does not  cause cancer over a long period of time. Oncologists who ceased to tell the falsehood on behalf of their employer, such as Ralph Moss, were sacked the very next day.  There is no clear proof or even a study that smoking beedi causes as much cancer as cigarette. If the government charges very high rate of tax on the poorest man's fag, they will simply smoke unbranded beedi on which there is no tax and cannot practically be a tax. The government must be credited with some common sense that for decades it has not been influenced by the most outlandish argument of the cigarette lobby. Without a lobby behind it, it is not practicable that hundred oncologists will come together to write in double quick time to Prime Minister on this issue.

Sukumar Mukhopadhyay | New Delhi

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