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Monday, 28 October 2024

Tamoghna Halder vs Tirthankar Roy

Capitalism is about getting poor people to work for a wage lower than their marginal product thus generating a profit. You can't make a profit if your workforce starves to death. Indeed, famine drives up real wages and reduces rents (which Capitalists also have in their portfolios). 

Settler Colonialism may be about ethnic cleansing indigenous people in which case it is fine with famine and epidemics. Indeed, it may actively destroy food sources for the natives. But India didn't have settler colonialism. Neither the East India Company not the Raj which succeeded it had any financial incentive to permit famine. On the contrary, they were under pressure from the folk back home to do famine relief even if this meant introducing an income tax which the Indians didn't want at all. 

Tamoghna Halder, whose PhD is from California, takes a different view. Attacking Tirthankar Roy, it writes-

What are the causes of famines? Contesting Theories

Roy’s central argument is that the scholarship linking British colonialism to the Indian famines, is outdated and discarded by the most important research in Economic History.

To call it 'scholarship' is to gild the lily. There was polemics on the one hand and some Government reports on the other. That is all.  

Roy offers five arguments to support this claim and I will investigate all of them, but first, one should note that in academia, particularly in Economics, it is rare for ideas to be ‘universally discarded’.

Which is why the academy is where you park credentialized cretins.  

Broadly speaking, on the origin and explanation of famines – there exists several views.

The Malthusian view would suggest famines are inevitable (and in implication, necessary) checks that would naturally emerge and balance the unrestricted growth of population, and in the process, mitigate the shortage of food.

Only if the population is too stupid to raise productivity and mobility. Still, we can imagine a lazy King or 'Stationary Bandit' being too stupid or callous to prevent a fall in his own revenue. Equally, as in the Irish potato famine, it may be in the interest of the more vocal or influential class to increase their landholdings while getting rid of people who may be related to them by blood but whose manner of life has not changed for the better. The Finnish famine, a little later, was about asserting autonomy and thus had a political aspect.  

The Entitlement approach, furthered by Amartya Sen, would view famines originating out of failures to map endowments to entitlements, and shortage of food may neither be a necessary nor sufficient explanation for famines.

If Sen were correct, millions of Bengalis starved in '43 and '74 because they were too stupid to understand that they could get fed in a jail cell if they simply pissed on a passing policeman.  

Although Sen’s entitlement approach could possibly be attributed to left-leaning economic thoughts,

it was attributable to Sen's stupidity. Also, after his Daddy died and he ran away from India with his best friend's wife, he didn't have to worry about being called a fucking imbecile by guys who knew what had happened in '43 and '74.  

the Marxist approach to famine is more specific and differs from Sen’s.

Marxists are good at causing famines. That's true enough.  

For example, the entitlement approach does not explain why the Irish masses, in the years leading up to the great famine, became heavily reliant on potatoes (a reduction in their subsistence endowment set),

The fact is the propertied class in Ireland, both Catholic and 'Ascendancy' decided there would be no fucking 'entitlement' to relief for anyone owning even one tenth of an acre. A lot of land changed hands during that period. Also, the 'masses' got the hint and fucked off to America where they soon started to do very well for themselves.  

while the Marxist view does. Typically, Marxist historians use a distinct set of analytical tools to examine agrarian and ecological conditions leading up to a famine.

Do they use those 'tools' to examine Stalin and Mao's famines? No. They tell stupid lies about them. 

In the Irish example, they would argue that a combination of increased extraction of surplus from each worker,

those who starved weren't working for anybody. They were eating the potatoes they grew on their own soil.  

and an increase in the number of tenants (through subdivision of land)

This was because in the early eighteenth century, Catholics had been obliged by law to carve up their estates. It was a purely political measure.  

resulted in limited amounts of land allotted for subsistence production, and in turn, left the Irish population heavily reliant on just one crop.

There was a similar problem in parts of Scotland but the wealthy were keen to offer relief and assisted passages to Canada etc.  


Further, Cormac O Grada’s work “Famine: A Short History”, engages with different frameworks but refrains from offering a one size fits all argument. He manages to shed light on the different roles that market, natural calamities, wartime rationing and distribution policies may have played in causing and/or worsening most of the famines across the world and over centuries.

He can't come out and say that both the Catholic Church (which wasn't that much loved by Gaelic speaking subsistence farmers) and the Catholic middle-class wanted these 'unproductive' people gone so that they could get the Eire of their dreams.  

It exposes both the relevance and restricted nature of the different contending theories of famine,

Famine is caused by food availability deficit brought on by blight, floods, volcanic activity etc. The solution as B.R Sen persuaded the world, is to bring in lots of food and make sure it gets to hungry people. After that, like Bangladesh, you can invest in agriculture so that output quadruples.  

and in my opinion, is perhaps one of the ‘most important research’ on famine out there. While some scholars may fail to acknowledge the enormous potential as well as limitations in all these different takes, for the rest of the world, these debates are far from being settled.

They were settled long ago for sensible people. When Herbert Hoover saw a famine he got a lot of food and took it to the hungry people. That's why he was elected President.  


Fact Checking of Roy’s Argument One:

Let’s cut to the chase. Roy’s first argument is that we don’t really know the frequency and severity of famines before the colonial era, and hence, can’t really compare them with the famines in colonial India.

We know there were horrible famines in India and China. We also know that saying 'Brits caused famines' is like saying 'Viceroy Sahib drained trillions of starving Indians of their jizz by sucking them off while they were sleeping.'  

Not really. There exists enormous amounts of documentation on the frequency and severity of famines, for both colonial and pre colonial India. It’s fine if Roy does not want to believe in any of these accounts from pre colonial India, but his beliefs may be rooted in profound ignorance. First, he writes that nationalists such as B M Bhatia claimed that in pre colonial India, severe famines occurred only once in 50 years. False. B M Bhatia never claimed that.

Yes he did though admittedly he was just repeating something some White dude had written. His thesis was that incidence of famine increased because of increased monetization under the British. But this just cashes out as saying that there was higher mortality where expectations were not rational. But we can explain any type of untimely death in that way. Why did my friend, Drunkard P Drunkard die at the young age of 18? The answer is that he did not expect to die when he got drunk and got behind the wheel of his daddy's car. 

He cited these statistics from Alexander Loveday’s work (The History and Economics of Indian Famines, 1914), in which Loveday, a young British scholar at Cambridge himself made that claim, based on a list of famines that he compiled (297 – 1907). Not just Bhatia, but several economic historians, including Cormac O Grada have cited this statistic from Loveday’s work as it is the first academic work to (a) carefully compile a list of famines, after some degree of scrutiny of the sources, and (b) to discuss the economic conditions around these famines.

Stupid academics writing about shite that nobody gives a toss about are welcome to eat each other's shit.  


Second, Roy believes that frequency of famines in pre colonial India depended on the frequency of hagiographies.

i.e. the biographies of Saints though Roy extends the term to sycophantic royal biographies. 

This is an example of how ignorance often leads to false perceptions. Not all the entries in Loveday’s list (which Roy must read or revisit) are based on hagiographies, as hagiographies could not have been written every 5 years – the average frequency of famines in India during 917 – 1907 (according to Loveday).

The problem here is that we know that sometime soon after the agricultural revolution, buffer stocks were maintained. Furthermore there was enough spare land for foraging to supplement cereal production. Finally, in good years inferior grains were fed to animals who were slaughtered and eaten in bad years.  

Another resource would be Paul Greenough’s list of Indian famines between 298 BC and 1943-44 which identifies “four famines before 1000 AD, twenty-four between 1000 and 1499 AD, eighteen in the sixteenth century, twenty-seven in the seventeenth, eighteen in the eighteenth, and thirty in the nineteenth.” One can keep adding, but let me end with this one, which again does not rely solely on hagiographies. This list refers (and links) to multiple reports among other historical records, documents 75+ famines between 1500 to 1750.

So what? People don't care what happened long ago. If some guy says 'Churchill starved my ancestors to death', you can reply 'Churchill also sucked them off so as to deprive them of their precious jizz'. If they deny this accuse them of homophobia. The fact is, we may be ready to claim that Jews or Whites or high caste people robbed and oppressed our ancestors. However, we fight shy of admitting that they were subject to fellatio and cunnilingus by evil Viceroys or Chief Rabbis or whatever.  

Hopefully these resources would enable Roy to write his next article with more evidence, and claim what he is dying to claim – “famines were as frequent and deadly, if not more in pre colonial India”.

It is enough to say they were more frequent and deadly in China. Mao's famine was the biggest ever. Since it was 'man-made' stupid Bengalis needed to claim that the Brits engineered famines. 

Once he does that, I will consider another response but given his citations are all over the place, I am afraid he might end up citing me for making the claim above. I am not even claiming all these resources (and corresponding sources) would check out on face value. I am only doing a fact checking exercise at this point, and my humble submission is just that Roy’s first argument is factually flawed.

We have to admit that the Raj had better statistics than previous administrations. I suppose once we have a full DNA map of India, we may be able to narrow down 'bottle neck' events which correlate with climate change, volcanic eruptions etc, and speculate about previous population size and likely mortality rates. But there is no pressing urgency to do this.

A noteworthy observation is that almost all the pre colonial famines, going by the historical records, hagiographies and reports, were caused and exacerbated by a mix of factors: natural calamities, wars, and poor policy responses.

Bad governance can indeed cause depopulation even in very fertile regions. People run away to deserts and mountains and thickly forested regions.  

And for that matter, famines could have occurred even as a result of certain economic policies. Maybe Roy would be relieved to know that the British were not the first to induce famines through bad policymaking. For example, some historians argue that the 1291 famine under Alauddin Khilji’s regime, resulted from a set of market policies that fixed the prices of grain. There is no data that can substantiate such a claim, and yet it is a largely accepted one!

No it isn't. Nobody gives a shit.  

The point is, studying historical records does not necessarily require analyzing statistical tables, and particularly in the absence of data, depending on historical narratives, accounts, and hagiographies is a widely accepted method. Those who seriously engage with such historical accounts, are almost always careful in making inferences, admissibly due to biases in the narratives, just like a mindful cliometrician would do. In fact, colonial census records are not free from administrative biases and inconsistencies – does that mean Roy should stop using them?

Nobody cares. This isn't a high IQ field because the thing is useless. Famines, like other sources of excess mortality, can be the result of irrational expectations or constraints on mobility. 


Fact Checking of Roy’s Argument Two:

In academia, careless and casual lying is known as misrepresentation and willful omission

not in Indian academia where it is known as being a Bengali buddhiji showing commitment to the shtruggle of the masshes.  

of facts originating from lack of rigorous scrutiny of resources at disposal. Roy’s second argument, “Why did the south have three famines during 1877 to 1899 but not the north?” is a classic example of that. First, the north did witness famines during this time.

I suppose, as a Bengali, Roy was thinking of Bengal.  

The famine of 1896-97, which Roy mentions as one of the three major famines to have hit the Deccan, actually started in Bundelkhand and eventually impacted Bihar, United Provinces Central and Western provinces in addition to the Deccan! Second, even the famine of 1877, which was devastating for the Deccan, directly impacted certain parts of north and central India. In fact, all the famines that occurred during the second half of the 19th century, taken together, resulted in excess mortality in almost all the provinces.

All were associated, as Roy says, with the failure of the monsoons. The North, which had snow fed rivers were spared.  

Third, while it is true that all the major famines during this time came right after severe shortfall of monsoon rains (and subsequent drought), the path from drought to famine to excess mortality passed through several junctions, including that of colonial policies.

Not to mention the previous Indian policy of being so utterly shit that a handful of Britishers took over the country.  

Even when the severity of drought remained more or less similar across districts for a given famine, there was great heterogeneity at the level of districts in terms of implementation of relief policies, grain exports, attitude of local administration, railway access – to name a few among a multitude of factors that caused a greater heterogeneity of impact (excess mortality, migration etc.) across these districts.

Which is what we'd expect. We know that if there is a sudden food shortage in our country- caused by a dockworker's strike or something of that sort- some areas will do better than others because of greater State capacity or private provision. 

Each of the colonial famines, therefore, deserves a discussion of their own,

only if you have nothing better to do- i.e. are too fucking stupid to study or teach something worthwhile.  

along with a scrutiny of policies before, during and after, but for the sake of time, let’s look at the broad picture.

Broader picture was of Viceroy shamelessly sucking off trillions of darkies.  

Understanding the famines under colonial rule:

is like understanding those that went before or which (but for American food aid) would have come after it. 


One can broadly divide the timeline between the Battle of Plassey till India’s independence in three parts: 1757 – 1858 (takeover and expansion of EIC rule, and multiple severe famines), 1858 – 1900 (British Raj with multiple severe famines) and 1900 – 1947 (British Raj with almost no severe famines, except in 1943).

Which occurred because elected Indians had power over food and land in Bengal from 1937 onward.  

In the first part, which witnessed the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 (among several others),

this was 3 years before it took over the administration (Nizamat) 

the EIC initially left the matter of disaster management to the goodwill of private individuals, while simultaneously ensuring increased amounts of land tax collection during and after the famine.

Because it had the 'Diwani' in 1765 for which it paid some money to the Emperor.  

In the case of the subsequent famines, the EIC attempted to act, but with no real intentions of preventing loss of life. As Alexander Loveday remarked, “If the mortality of 1783 was less, it was mainly due to the lesser intensity of the famine; and though the expenditure was greater in 1832 and 1837, its benefits were counterbalanced by an almost equal incompetency”.

Foreign merchants and soldiers aren't good at managing things in a far away country. What a shocker! The question is why were Indians so crap that a bunch of foreigners could take over the country? If you can't defend your country, why feed its people? Take your money and run away some place which is safe and has food. 

The second half of the 19th century saw some change in the attitude of the British as the crown took over, but several of the administrators were still high on Malthus.

You don't have to read some dead economist to justify doing as little as possible in return for your wages.  

Enough has been written on Richard Temple’s erratic switch from a relatively generous mode of relief (Bihar famine, 1874) to a strictly conservative one in 1877 (The Deccan famine). His policy of providing only a pound of grain a day, known as ‘Temple Ration’, compounded the severity of the deccan famine.

An ambitious civil servant wants to pander to his boss. What a shocker!  

On top of it, the British saw the process of famine relief as a window to exploit labor – the already struggling masses had to earn the relief by working in large scale construction (roads, among other public projects) in both rural and urban areas.

Why are poor people expected to work for the money they need to feed themselves? Also, how come billionaires- like Elon Musk- don't come and wipe my bum for me?  

In exchange they were paid at best subsistence wages, also known as the famine wages.

Whereas in independent India, 'food for work' schemes provided champagne and caviar. 

This measure of ‘anyone able to work should earn their relief’ continued even in the case of the famines during 1896-97 and 1899-1900,

Even in the UK, those who can work are expected to look for work in order to receive unemployment benefit.  

and excess mortality too, remained a reality, but these famines also saw a relatively greater expenditure on relief as well as somewhat uniform implementation of ‘The Famine Codes’ (drafted during the 1880s) at the district level, albeit not at a province level.

So, British rule got better as its people got to know more about India.  

In the third period (1900 – 1947), there was no severe famine other than the 1943 Bengal Famine, which possibly makes Roy so satisfied that he goes on to claim that colonialism did not cause the famines, rather it mitigated those.

In Bengal, the transition to elected Premiers caused two big famines- one in '43, the other in '74. The first may be called a war-time famine. The second was the product of Mujib's stupid Socialism. What is notable is that Indians did not care about famines or great epidemics. They were Malthusian in their thinking.  

He attributes this success to the rapid expansion of railways during the late 19th century and afterwards, which integrated the domestic markets faster than ever, and he is correct – but only partially. Railways were not the sole channel through which famines were mitigated. As several scholars including Cormac O Grada notes, there was a gradual shift in attitude of the policymakers and administrators, away from ‘hard line Malthusianism’.

The English had their last famine in 1623. They saw that it was more profitable to keep poor people alive and doing something useful in the Work-House or as recipients of 'outdoor relief'. But this was locally financed. Indians could have approached their District Magistrate and offered to raise funds to feed the starving. Indeed, something like this did happen in certain places.  

There is ample text based evidence, in reports after reports that the British administrators wrote (including the policy responses), where voices such as Richard Temple’s gradually faded away, and that of principled Smithians who also wanted to save some lives, rose to prominence.

What had changed was Missionaries and Philanthropists- many of whom were American- raising funds and organizing shipments to starving people wherever they might be found.  

They did not compromise on the principles of the free market and open trade policies, but certainly moved away from the argument of Malthusian checks and balances.

The Brits knew very well that irrigation was the key to overcoming rainfall based food availability deficit. The Punjabis in the canal colonies were prepared to pay for this amenity. Other parts of the country were less enthused.  

And let’s talk about this railway business for a second. The railways were not set up as a policy response to mitigate famines.

So what? The internet wasn't invented for watching porn- but that is what it is mainly used for.  

The impact of railways in mitigating or preventing famines in the late 19th and early 20th century, is simply a by-product, not the objective of the railways’ existence.

Just as this nutter being a Professor is a by-product, not the objective, of his being as stupid as shit.  

The policy failures that multiple scholars

i.e useless tossers teaching nonsense to retards 

blame for the famines, were either direct measures pursued in response to famines, or measures related to land, infrastructure and trade policies in the years leading to (as well as during) the famines.

What saved India from big famines in the Sixties? American food aid. In 1966, India produced about 70 million tons of food grain. America had to supply 10 million tons. Without it, 30 million may have died. This still does not beat what Mao had achieved for his country but it comes close.  

The role of the former receives more prominence in academia but even the latter, mostly furthered by the scholarship from left historians, raises several questions regarding the British policies and their impact on Indian agriculture and ecology.

The question is why things got worse when Indians took over. The answer is that those Indians tended to be Leftists.  

Core argument is that certain areas were left so vulnerable that any weather shock could easily translate to famine (or famine-like) conditions.

because the wealthier Indians had no interest in maintaining buffer stocks or reservoirs for water. But then, if Indians hadn't been shitty they would not have been ruled by foreigners. True those foreigners fucked off when the place no longer yielded a profit but begging for food from other foreigners means you are dependent not independent.  

Areas that depended on floods for farming, were left vulnerable to floods

a good thing if they 'depended on floods for farming'. 

by mindless infrastructure projects.

The Brits didn't waste money on 'mindless' projects. The Indians did.  

Cultivable lands were left uncultivable in several parts of the doab.

by the British Earls and Dukes who comprise so much of the population of the Gangetic plane.  

In some places they pursued irrigation projects and messed up the water distribution, while not pursuing such projects in areas that needed it.

Nope. Their irrigation projects were successful enough.  

One should be mindful that none of these are uncontested claims, but the objections to these are not full proof either – leaving certain questions open and worthy to investigate.

By cretins. 


Roy’s third argument: lies and damned lies, without statistics

In his third point, Roy criticizes Sullivan and Hickel for relying on Allen’s work on living standards on the grounds that the “India dataset on wages … is of doubtful value.” and of course, he does not cite any supporting evidence.

It is self-evident. If we don't have a good dataset today, how likely is it that good datasets were available way back then.  

Perhaps, careful citation is a task left only for the leftist scholars.

If by 'careful citation' you mean eating your own shit- sure.  

Roy goes on to claim that Sullivan and Hickel should not have cited this data, for two reasons – (a) “almost all the data that Allen and others use come from the indo-gangetic plains, which did not see famine in the nineteenth century”

There was quite a big famine in the Doab in 1861. 

and (b) “there is nothing comparable—in fact, nothing at all—for the regions where the Deccan famines broke out.” Let’s count how many things Roy threw out of the window in these two sentences.

One, in saying that the indo-gangetic plains did not see any famine in nineteenth century, he disregarded the death of millions of people that died from the Upper Doab Famine (1860-62), casualties from the Bihar famine, and several hundred thousand more from direct and indirect impact of the 1896-97 famine – which, as mentioned earlier, started in Bundelkhand and impacted large parts of United Provinces, Bihar (in addition to other places that don’t belong to the indo gangetic plains). How on earth does he keep repeating the lie that 19th century northern India (and the indo gangetic plains) did not witness any famine?

He is Bengali. It is second nature for Bengalis to repeat stupid lies. I suppose Roy was hoping some fellow Bengali nutter would totally lose his shit over this claim 

I am now tired of this business of counting, but, two, he completely disregarded the work of both Parthasarathy as well as Broadberry & Gupta, who would disagree with each other on certain accounts, but both provide long term series of wages in southern India.

They think India's per capita GDP fell from about 60% of Britain's in 1600 to less than 15% by 1871. In other words, 'the great divergence' predates colonialism. However, it was only after Independence that Britain became a magnet for Indian immigrants. 

Broadberry and Gupta, in fact, estimates northern and southern Indian wages to be at similar levels, both in terms of grain wages as well as silver wages, and show that the southern Indian wage data is suitable even for international comparisons. If Roy does not find that exercise a useful one, he should have offered a counter argument, but instead he chose to dismiss these previous works altogether by misrepresenting and wilfully omitting….

But such work would strengthen the case against blaming Colonialism for everything. The fact is, there was a time when European artisans- e.g. the guys who made Bata shoes- found it worthwhile to relocate to India. Productivity matters. It went up for some Indians- e.g. Parsi carpenters turned ship-builders- while other Indians preferred to remain idle.  


Roy’s fourth argument: (mis)using Ravallion

Several scholars have argued how exports compounded the severity of famines in colonial times.

Sadly, imports of food- more particularly free food- can compound the underlying problem even more. However, there can be no doubt that the evil British, or Capitalist, practice of discouraging people from eating their own shit is the major cause of hunger in the world.  

One is free to agree or disagree based on evidence. What Roy does in his fourth argument, however, may cause Martin Ravallion to roll his eyes from the grave.

to turn over in his grave.  

In a haste to defend colonial trade policies in the face of famines, Roy spins the story from Ravallion (1987) and claims that Ravallion showed how “food exports did not expose the countryside to a food shortage” and that “trade stabilized domestic consumption rather than reducing it”.

That's how trade works. If people can grow food for the export market they produce much more. This means more food is available domestically if there is a sudden supply shock.  In any case, it is part of High School Economics to show that if buffer stocks are used to equalize farm income over a period, then there is less price volatility and unwanted 'cobweb' effects. 

Ravallion’s original claim is way more nuanced. Yes, he does remark: “Adam Smith’s influential followers in India appear to have been right in their assessment of the main qualitative effects of trade during famines.” But observing the small change in short run, he also comments, “external trade was a less-than-perfect consumption stabilizer and export sluggishness and output lags considerably diminished its short run performance”,

Because of poor infrastructure and internal barriers to trade and arbitrage.  

and concludes, despite his theoretical support of the Smithian principles, “… trade’s quantitative effect in insulating domestic rice consumption from output uncertainty does not support an optimistic assessment of the potential for short-run stabilization by these means.

Not at that time but, this happened later as non-monsoon based rice became available on global markets and as cost of delivery fell. Still, there may be considerable volatility in premium varieties. The good news is that cereals are 'inferior' and so if productivity, and therefore income, rises then food price volatility has less and less impact. 

And the extent of famine relief by trade is likely to have depended heavily on its short-run effects.”

Because people starve in the short run. It doesn't take them fifty years to die because they are getting nothing to eat.  

The other works that Roy cites, do not really establish any direct causal channel between trade openness and mitigation of weather shocks.

None is necessary if you know anything at all about where the food you buy comes from. If long grain Basmati becomes too expensive, families may substitute some other variety or switch to eating wheat.  

Lack of causality is not necessarily a demerit, but that does not settle the discussions either.

The only way to keep the discussion open is by confining it to useless tossers teaching nonsense to retards. 


Roy’s fifth argument, or an incoherent rant

Roy’s fifth argument is a rant against Mike Davis. Rants are often fun, engaging and even enriching to read,

says this ranter who isn't fun at all 

but this one is sheerly incoherent and incomprehensible. Yes, weather shocks happened throughout the period of 1900-1947, and those did not translate to famine – and yes, part of it is attributed to the railways but parts of it, as explained earlier in this response, is also because of a sharp change in the attitude of the policymakers.

England was less and less reliant on profits or rents from India. You also had Irish MPs and Christian missionaries and other do-goodniks like Florence Nightingale kicking up a stink about the horrible conditions in India.  

His remark that there is no evidence that colonial apathy ended in the 1900s,

it had ended some time previously for political reasons internal to Britain.  

is a denial of the series of reports that document these changes, and I have discussed this at least twice in this response already!

But there had been reports prior to that. I imagine that a lot of people read A.O Hume's book on agriculture which came out at the end of the eighteen seventies.  

And there goes his five arguments, written with utmost disrespect and disregard for almost all previous work on the topic, generously sprinkled with ignorance and half baked truths.

But Roy is right and this nutter is wrong.  

I am no particular fan of either the left or right-leaning scholarship on Indian famines,

they are shit produced by useless shitheads.  

and personally for me, much remains desired from the left,

give them a break. It is no small achievement on the part of Stalin and Mao to have manufactured more famine deaths than anyone in human history.  

as several of their existing claims have long been contested, but the ground of contestation has to be valid, and rooted in facts – neither distortions, nor intentional omissions are going to help Roy’s academic credentials. However, Sir Tirthankar Roy may indeed succeed in reaping whatever fruits he is expecting out of his mission of defending colonialism.

Whereas this nutter has to teach at Aziz Premji university. Sad.  

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