Fans troll Nirmala Sitharaman after hearing how much D. Gukesh has to pay in tax on his prize money after winning the World Chess Championship. Frankly, you couldn’t even blame the trolls if you wished to after hearing the amount of tax being collected by the Indian government, which is a whopping 4.67 crores in Indian currency.
On 12th December 2024, India saw history being made in front of their eyes with D. Gukesh winning the World Chess Championship against former World Chess Champion Ding Liren. Do you know why this achievement is such a major win for all of India? Firstly, Gukesh broke the record to become the youngest World Chess Champion at 18.
He is the second grandmaster to bring home the prestigious FIDE World Chess Champion Award after Viswanathan Anand. Lastly, the Indian chess diaspora gets much-needed encouragement to work on improving their skills and participating in chess matches internationally.
However, the match results did not satisfy several renowned grandmasters worldwide, creating a lot of controversy. Some fans of the game shared that the match seemed unfair. However, all the unfair rumors were laid to rest as FIDE rubbished the claim that Ding was purposefully losing to Gukesh.
On the other hand, Indians couldn’t keep calm about the win and celebrate the win across media through memes, reels, and congratulatory messages. However, it seems the Indian government is celebrating the win because of the prize money D. Gukesh is set to bring to the country, which is 11 crores of Indian rupees.
Fans calculated that the 2024 World Chess Champion will have to pay a whopping 4.67 crores to the Indian government. This led to increased trolling of the Income Tax Department and Nirmala Sitharaman, the Indian finance minister, on social media. Some fans say Gukesh can defeat the former chess champion but not the Indian Income Tax Department.
Several memes of the finance minister are on the rounds with captions congratulating the Indian Income Tax Department on earning 5 crores in prize money without doing anything. What are your thoughts about high-earning individuals paying an income tax of 30% on their earnings?
