Ahead of Indian festive season Amazon's headache, building up for more than five years, could turn into a throbbing migraine.
The world’s second-richest man is getting an almost daily reminder of how tough it will be to win in the second-most-populous nation. Unlike in China, where the recent attack on tech titans has been delivered with the full formal might of state power, the latest blow on Amazon.com Inc. in India has come from unexpected, and unofficial, quarters.
Chairman Jeff Bezos is on the cover of Panchjanya, a Hindi weekly he’s unlikely to have ever heard of. The article inside, provocatively titled “East India Company 2.0”, goes on to argue that Amazon is threatening the economic freedom of small Indian traders, attempting to hijack policies and politics, and--via Prime Video--degrading Hindu culture and promoting Western values and Christianity.
There can be nothing flattering in being compared to the 17th-century British firm that came to trade with a rich, vast land only to end up conquering and plundering it. But does the opprobrium really mean much? Both Bezos and his empire have faced robust criticism around the world, for everything from low pay and poor working conditions in the retailer’s warehouses to its alleged anti-competitive practices. Speaking of unfavorable articles, Lina Khan earned her spurs with her 2017 Yale Law Journal entry, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” and she’s now the chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The reason to take the Indian publication’s disapproval seriously is that Panchjanya, “the sound of righteousness,” isn’t any other magazine. Founded by one of the leading figures of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the RSS, it’s widely believed to be a mouthpiece of the Hindu cultural organization that stands behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, nurturing his right-wing nationalist party with ideological sustenance and voter mobilization.
The timing of Amazon’s bad publicity couldn’t have been worse. The media site Morning Context recently reported that the Seattle-based e-commerce firm is investigating a whistleblower complaint, which alleged that certain monies paid by the retailer have been funneled into bribes by one or more of its legal representatives in India. In its reply to the news website’s questionnaire, Amazon said it had “zero tolerance” for graft. It declined to confirm the specific allegations or the status of any investigation.
What is the scale of this alleged bribery? Soon after the Morning Context exclusive, there was a flurry of other media reports, which cited anonymous sources to put a number on what various Amazon entities had spent as legal fees in India in two years: 85.46 billion rupees ($1.2 billion). The Confederation of All India Traders, which accuses the platform of hurting small sellers, latched on to the figure and wrote to Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal — himself no fan of e-commerce platforms — about a “whopping amount” being spent to “manipulate Indian government officials.”
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