I did think of Nestle as well, and another one, Tata. They’re infamous for stealing land belonging to indigenous people in India. In 2006, the state police of the Orissa government shot 12 people, including a child, in a crowd protesting state-sponsored land grabbing. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa200012007en.pdf

The most iron-rich part of India, Bastar, is also the poorest, and with the most number of Maoist militias. This is no coincidence. Tribal people make up only 9% of the country’s population, but more than 40% of the land used to build ‘development’ projects belonged originally to them. The most mineral rich areas in India, and the world, are some of the poorest because the industries are not publicly owned.

To be honest, I can think of much, much worse. Union Carbide, Adani, Aveo, which was funding a drug epidemic in Nigeria, they’re all bad. There’s no good capitalist.

Understandable. .world is generally Eurocentric or US-centric. I stay away from most political comms there for my own sanity.

Lucky you. I live in southern Sanghiland, Karnataka.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It is Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

Yep.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?