“The Jagga Tax” and Psychodynamics of Tax Morale in Pakistan

Abstract

Lollywood Punjabi film “Jagga Tax, 2002” – a typical bandit-hero movie – casually characterizes EXTORTION as TAX and effectively conflates them. Jagga Tax, 2002 is based on Jagga Gujjar who forcibly imposed bhatha on meat-sellers of Lahore in 1960s, which phenomenon gave rise to a popular catchphrase “Jagga Tax.” In turn, Punjab Police resorted to the Ghoonda Act, 1959, to crackdown on bhatha business syndicates, which gave rise to Jagga Tax’s close variant “Ghoonda Tax;” with both being consistently used since interchangeably. These two conceptual vulgarizations of TAX – normally considered a superior socio-civic obligation of the citizenry towards the state – through later decades have led to the social construction of a perverted tax reality that may be an omnipresent, embedded, and a critically important variable of low tax morale in Pakistan. The paper examines not only Jagga Tax, 2002, but also parsimoniously scans theatre and television to generate requisite empirics to support the main premise of the paper. It is posited that having become part of the vernacular and gotten institutionalized into the semantics of the society, both “Jagga Tax,” and “Ghoonda Tax,” have been systematically exploited to legitimize illegal extortion, and de-legitimize ‘legal extortion’ – as and when suited to societal segments. The paper leverages this perverted tax reality to seminally undertake a sub-surface analysis of tax morale – intrinsic willingness of an individual or a group to defray their tax liability voluntarily – namely, its psychodynamics or what lies beneath the intrinsic willingness in a Pakistani context.