NEW DELHI
Tamil Nadu Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan Sunday hit back at Goa Transport Minister Mauvin Godinho after the latter alleged attempts to stifle his State’s voice at the GST council meet held Friday.
Rajan described the claims as “baseless lies”, adding that Godinho’s statements at the council meeting were “highly repetitive, largely vacuous, hectoring, mostly redundant to others; inputs, supercilious, and devoid of the basic courtesy of assuming good faith in the comments of other states’ ministers”.
In a Twitter statement issued to the “People of Goa”, Rajan said Godinho spoke ‘many times the length of the inputs from the hon’ble minister from Uttar Pradesh, a state of over 20 crore citizens, and indeed every other state’.
Sworn in as minister earlier this month, he tweeted that he hopes to attain the “dignified restraint” shown by his counterparts in West Bengal, Punjab and others “in the face of provocation”.
He also said the statement is his attempt to counter “blatant lies and
hypocrisy”.
Rajan said he had supported the rights of the Goa government and had done no harm to the state’s people. He also questioned the wisdom of the Goa chief minister for his nomination of Godinho as the state’s representative in the council.
Rajan said Tamil Nadu’s stance in the council sought to strengthen states’ rights and federal governance even when it meant the loss of revenues to Tamil
Nadu.
“There was no agenda item regarding Goa’s intention to levy any cess, so I simply could not have voted at all on an agenda item that did not exist, let alone vote against it!” he added.
Godinho, Rajan added, “vociferously, and repeatedly” opposed lowering the GST on Covid-related drugs & vaccines from 5 per cent to 0 per cent on humanitarian grounds.
Both Rajan and Godinho represent their respective states in the council and were involved in a tiff at the council meet, which took place through video conferencing, over the issue of equal representation and voting rights to all states, irrespective of their population.
