India spent a decade learning why retrospective tax is poison. We're about to throw the lesson away.
Picture this: your team wins a cricket match, clean, by the rules of the game that day. A year later, the umpire changes a rule and applies it backward — and declares you lost the match you already won.
That's retrospective tax. You broke nothing. They moved the line, then pointed it at your past.
We did exactly this to Vodafone in 2012, chasing them over a 2007 deal. Cairn Energy got hit too. Both went to international arbitration. Both won. India refunded over $1.2 billion and spent years as the cautionary tale that every global investor cited as the reason they hesitated on us.
In 2021, we finally repealed it and called retro taxation a thing of the past. Capital started trusting us again.
This week, the courts upheld retrospective GST on online gaming. Dream11 and an entire industry now owe tax on years of operations under rules that didn't exist at the time.
Retrospective tax doesn't punish what you did. It punishes you for not predicting what the government would later wish you'd done.
As a country, we should not set such a precedent.
#Noretrospectivetax