By Samee Ahmad
14th Oct 2024
Over the coming days and weeks, the Indian media will shower praise on one the country’s favourite industrialists, Ratan Tata, the man who turned the Tata Group into a global behemoth. But beyond the gaze of the billionaire class or those seeking to emulate it, there will be others who will remember what Ratan Tata represented to the rest of us. These include land theft, displacement, rampant capitalism, corporate fraud and working with the zionist entity, Israel. Our contributor Samee Ahmad with this alternate obituary of Ratan Tata, and the launch of a new campaign by SALAM later this week.
An alternate obituary, Oct 14, 2024
Ratan Tata (born 28 December 1937), chairman of the Tata Group and scion of the Tata family, died on Wednesday, October 9th after a long illness.
Tata, a devoted capitalist and household name in India, played a historic role in the development of Indian capitalism, ruthlessly trampling on Dalit, Adivasi and working-class communities in his pursuit of wealth.
His fortune blossomed as a direct result of his dedication to prolonging climate devastation and ecocide, worsening labor exploitation, and profiteering directly off the zionist occupation of Palestine in close collaboration with the American Military Industrial Complex.
The legacy of the Tata corporation has been its century and a half long feverish grip over land, labor and foreign investments in India.
Beyond the boardroom to the factory and fields – under Ratan Tata’s chairmanship, Tata continued to swallow industries from automobile manufacturing to weapons and telecommunications.The Tata Corporation worked hard to maintain his and the corporation’s image as a harbinger of developmental capitalism by playing philanthropist and peacemaker but we see these efforts for what they are: crass covers for Tata’s role in land theft, worker abuse, and a genocide that has already massacred more than 180,000 Palestinians.
In India, Tata’s factories occupy land stolen from indigenous Adivasi communities. The state calls in the military to suppress them when they protest, the same Indian forces empowered by Tata’s endless supply of weapons and armored vehicles. Tata and the Indian state then collaborate to deploy these armaments against Maoists in central India and in the brutal occupation of Kashmir.
If anyone mourns Ratan Tata today it is those who exist at the nexus of state repression, military jingoism, and Hindu nationalism. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him a “visionary” and a “compassionate soul” on Twitter (x), adding that he “would meet him frequently in Gujarat when [he] was the CM.”As we know, Modi was responsible for the Gujarat pogrom in 2002 when he was Chief Minister, where over a thousand Muslims were murdered with state support.
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