Message to Modi: Do No More Harm (INDIA CRACKS OPEN DOOR TO ARBITRARY GOLD CONFISCATION)

...

What this means, unfortunately, is that India's income tax officers have just won the lottery. During a raid, they can, on the spot, decide whether or not to confiscate a family's gold holdings. And remember, India has an enormous amount of gold -- 20,000 metric tons, much of it inherited. (The rules governing simple searches are different, but few know that.) Rather than cleaning up tax administration, the government has handed tax officials more power than they've had for decades. The rich will pay what they need to escape harassment; the rest will suffer.

The worry is that the government, having committed itself to draconian measures to seize black money, will resort to more such attempts to live up to its promises. An India in which individuals are constantly concerned about their ability to explain their returns and their assets to powerful and poorly monitored tax officers is not one in which investment is likely to pick up. It fell another 5.6 percent in the latest GDP figures -- the third successive quarter it's dropped.

... many analysts agree with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who's predicting the new policy will knock 2 percentage points off that world-beating GDP growth rate.