#TataByeBye
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.
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.
That is not the only wretched company that Ratan Tata kept.
He was often seen with key figures like Mohan Bhagwat of the RSS, the largest right-wing militia in the world responsible for communal violence against Muslims in India, and elsewhere.
His namesake company, the Tata Group, is among a portfolio of Indian companies deeply invested in zionist apartheid.
The company hides behind a veneer of philanthropy to advance a capitalist empire built off of oppression and exploitation.
Tata sends electronics and components that are used in campaigns of violence against Palestinians and supplies the zionist army with Land Rovers that are turned into armored vehicles.
Additionally, its subsidiary Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), provides IT support and services for the zionist entity's surveillance infrastructure of Palestine.
This nefarious company maintains a major presence right here in our neighborhoods--it is the main sponsor of the New York City Marathon and finances a large research center at Cornell's campus on Roosevelt Island.
We do not mourn Ratan Tata--we do not mourn profiteers of genocide and apartheid.
Instead, we organize to support community self-determination outside the reaches of capitalist vultures and extractive corporations.
That's why this fall, SALAM is launching a campaign to tell Tata: bye bye!
Indian capitalists like Rattan Tata have produced and profited from the settler war machine.
We say: No more. We will not rest until we end the bloody alliance between Indian capital and zionist genocide.
SALAM will launch its campaign on October 17th at 18h00 EST at The People's Forum in New York City.
 | A guest post by
|
Great article but it should also mount a broader critique of the Tata group and its legacy, going back to Jamsetji Tata himself. I feel the Tata family has been romanticized to a disgusting degree as "anti-colonial nationalists" ignoring how much they represented the colonial native elite in British India, their hostility to the working class, how they treated Shapurji Saklatvala, the one member of their family to challenge and oppose capitalism, how they opposed Nehruvian social democracy (as problematic as Nehru was in other ways) and how they supported right wing nationalists like Sardar Patel. Not to mention the myth of the Tatas and Air India.
We need to drop the cult of Tata period