Ratan Tata, a prominent businessman of India, who had been the head of the Tata group of companies for long, died on 9th October 2024 at the age of 86.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratan_Tata
He was hailed by a large number of people, including Prime Minister Modi, who described him as a ” visionary business leader, a compassionate soul, and an extraordinary human being “.
Many people described him as a great philanthropist, as if businessmen earn money only with the intention of handing it over to others.
I kept quiet on the day of his death, i.e. 9th October, only posting on my fb page and twitter : ” There is a Latin maxim ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’ i.e. ‘Speak only good of the dead’. So I will speak no ill of Ratan Tata today ”.
But seeing on the media an avalanche of accolades, encomiums, eulogies, panegyrics and plaudits pouring in that day and the next, as if an Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill or Lenin had died, I could not stand this nonsense, claptrap, bunkum, gobbledygook, and blah blah any longer, and was constrained to write and get published an article titled ‘Ratan Tata was only a bania’ on 10th October, which I posted on facebook and twitter :
https://www.punjabtodaynews.com/ratan-tata-only-a-bania
After all, if the Latin maxim is to be strictly observed, one should speak no evil of Hitler, even though he got 6 million Jews sent to gas chambers, just because he was dead, and the same pinciple applied to his buddy Mussolini. It also applied to Gen Pinochet who got tens of thousands of people of Chile ‘diappeared’, or Gen Franco who did the same in Spain. It applied to Indira Gandhi, who to save her Prime Minister’s chair, imposed a fake Emergency in 1975, causing immense misery to hundreds of thousands of people of India, or her son Rajiv Gandhi who got thousands of innocent Sikhs brutally murdered in 1984 to wreak revenge for the assassination of his mother.
However, this article of mine resulted in a barrage of invectives, vituperation, expletives, billingsgate, fulmination and scurrilous jeremiad against me, as if I had committed blasphemy against some god.
So to pour some cold water on the heads of these ardent and avid fans, devotees and aficionadoes of Ratan Tata, and acquaint them with realities, I posted this on my facebook page on 11th October :
This revealed how Tatas, who had created an image of being ‘philanthropists’, had reportedly stolen lands of poor tribals, for setting up their steel plants
But this resulted in another torrent and tirade of abuses, castigation, calumnies, derision, excoriation and obloquys against me, some people calling me mad, others wishing me dead, etc
Not being a person who can be cowed down by such furious denunciation and vilification, I posted this piece titled ‘The ugly face of Tatas’ on my facebook page today, 12th October :
In India, Tata Steel operates integrated manufacturing facilities in Jamshedpur and Kalinganagar, with captive iron ore and coal mines, a dolomite mine, a chromite mine and manganese mines spread across Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha.
The company attracted controversy for reports of political corruption, theft, mass killings, and exploitation of its customers, Indian citizens and natural resources.
Tata Steel reportedly made its riches through large-scale takeover of tribal lands in Jharkhand and Orissa.
On 2 January 2006, Kalinganagar, Tribal Orissa villagers protested against the construction of a new steel plant for Tata Steel on land historically owned by them. Some of the villagers had been evicted without adequate relocation. Police retribution was brutal: 37 protesters were injured and 13 killed, including 3 women and a 13 year-old boy. Some people said that these atrocities had not been committed by Tatas. But the question is : for whose benefit were they committed ?
The Singur controversy in West Bengal was a series of protests by locals and political parties over the forced acquisition, eviction, and inadequate compensation to those farmers displaced for the Tata Nano plant.
I have nothing against businessmen. But what I object to is businessmen calling themselves philanthropists,or politicians calling businessmen ‘compassionate souls’, when the latter are quite cold blooded, calculating, creatures as if the public consists of fools
Righteous person like you must do your duty to expose the wrong doers.