[Text/Nilsh Christopher Translation/Liu Siyu]
This year's Hindu On the eve of the Holly Festival, in Kanpur, a northern Indian city, 10 men gathered outside a jewelry store with statues. These cardboard statues are five feet tall, with pink heads and swirling beards on their faces, and they are made to burn, one of the holiday customs. On the torso of the statue, the people nailed the avatar of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos .
This is part of a live demonstration organized by Pravin Kandwal, a businessman from Delhi who leads an organization of about 80 million small business owners known as the Confederation of All India Traders, or CAIT.
When the people of Kanpur have their Bezos portraits ready, hundreds of businessmen across the country also showed their portraits in their hands in Zoom video conferences (the demonstration was supposed to be held in person on the spot, but India is on the verge of a second deadly coronavirus outbreak, and cities across the country are already under lockdown). Some businessmen make video calls in their own shops, others are on the balcony and terrace, and others are standing on the street. Many people have their own cardboard version of the richest man in the world: a shop owner and his two children are picturing Bezos's head on a video call on Zoom, and there is also a silhouette of the bull demon Ravana with the words "AMAZON" printed on the devil's chest.
Indian businessmen burned Bezos' portrait to protest Amazon's oppression
Under Kandwal's command, they ignited the portrait of Bezos in their hands. During the Holly Festival, burning statues represents the elimination of the female devil Holka, an annual victory over evil. For shop owners and businessmen, Bezos is the demon that will burn this year.
This gimmick is Kandwal's latest gameplay. The 60-year-old businessman has a deep relationship with Narendra Modi BJP , and for more than 30 years he has appeared in the public eye as the leader of the All India Traders Federation. Kandwal and businessmen like him are the economic basis for the support that Modi has received in India; they represent the "mainstream" of India, the local economy that Modi likes to boast about in his speeches. But the lockdown caused by the new crown epidemic has ravaged India's physical enterprises, giving foreign e-commerce platforms such as Amazon the opportunity to enter the vision of more than one billion consumers in India.
As more Indians turn to Amazon and similar e-commerce platforms—the 90 million online shoppers are estimated to quadruple by 2025—Kandwal’s supporters are pushing their prime minister to take a tougher stance on the matter of Bezos, who wants to dominate the world, to open a store on their territory. Kandwar even launched a trader-friendly e-commerce platform, aptly named "Bharat E Market" (Bharat E Market, the name of Sanskrit for India), or "India's E Market), in an attempt to get a piece of the Internet economy.
When the mannequin began to burn and a wisp of smoke appeared on the screen, the sellers in the video conference began to yell in unison, "Let Amazon go back!", a sentence citing anti-colonial slogans against Britain.
"Why do we burn their portraits?" Kandwal shouted at his computer camera. "We decided to burn down portraits of Amazon and Flipkart (the largest e-commerce retailer in India, founded by two former Amazon employees) on the day of Holly's Day, showing them that India's laws are not weak and that India's government is not weak." The merchants cheered in unison. "This has become a problem that every village and every town has to face, so we all have united."
One night in December 2019, Kandwal browsed the internet with his iPhone and saw the headlines about Jeff Bezos' visit to India.While he has earned a reputation for winning corporate interests for small businesses since the 1990s, Kandwal has made Amazon his main target since 2016, when India relaxed its foreign investment laws and e-commerce giants began to storm his alliance of small business owners.
The Amazon CEO will meet with the Prime Minister and senior cabinet members, and this is his fourth visit to the country since the e-commerce giant set up the center here in 2004. “During his last visit (2014), he enjoyed the red carpet treatment at the Prime Minister’s Office,” Kandwal exclaimed. He vowed to make sure Bezos won't get the same treatment this time.
2017 Modi meets Bezos
Kandwal. Whenever he comes up with a promotional technique, his round, bearded face will flash with a smile. He speaks so quickly that it is confusing that he will slow down only when he switches to English. He is a rich man-in-one of the busiest market roads in Delhi, his hardware wholesale business has a storefront where he drives his maroon Jaguar to attend many meetings of politicians and businessmen. He wore an emerald ring on his little finger and a stack of cash in his pocket on the inside of his pants, which was in line with the characteristics of traditional Indian merchants.
In his family's office, dozens of framed photos hung on bright yellow walls, including a black and white portrait of three generations of merchants from the Kandwal family dressed in princely costumes. On the opposite wall, there is a 3-foot collage of Kandwal sitting with Prime Minister Modi, both of them laughing. Kandwal's family devoutly advocated Modi's BJP in part because of the Prime Minister's support for businessmen like them.
Since taking office in 2014, Modi has made it clear that India's attitude towards business is open. In his first column as Prime Minister in the Wall Street Journal , he wrote: “India will be open and friendly to business, thought, research, innovation and travel.” As Chief Minister of Gujarat, India, he has earned a reputation for business-friendly over the years, which has helped him gain support from Indians who are eager to improve their motherland’s international status.
Although Modi advocated India's openness to foreign business and innovation in the campaign, he also advocated putting Indian companies first. Shortly after taking office, the Modi government launched the "Made in India" campaign, a move aimed at promoting India to become a leader in manufacturing in the global market by relaxing certain regulations on foreign investment. In many ways, the practice of pushing India to open borders to foreign investors has played a role. Foreign capital flowing into the country reached an all-time high. He kicked off the 2019 campaign with a promise of "New India". Modi declared that the country would "return to its glorious past" and promised economic growth and national prosperity.
But the efforts to consolidate India's position in global trade have not done the same for local businesses. When Modi prepares for re-election in 2019, India's economic growth has recession to its lowest level in three years, and this year's COVID-19 epidemic has worsened the situation. To revive the weakened economy, the Indian government is carrying out its largest privatization campaign in more than a decade, selling its shares in major state-owned enterprises. While small businesses struggled in a severe economic situation, the market share of Amazon and Flipkart, owned by Walmart , grew sharply. The long-term lockdown of the epidemic this year has only further consolidated Amazon's position. Its sales have doubled since the coronavirus pandemic rages.
Bezos' second trip to India came shortly after Modi took office as prime minister, and a year after the e-commerce giant entered the Indian market in full swing. Shortly before the visit, Bezos announced a $2 billion investment in India to help him develop his business nationwide, and Bezos also met with him in Modi's office. The Indian Prime Minister posted a picture of the meeting on Twitter, and the two of them looked at each other and smiled.
Although Bezos is warmly welcomed, India has safeguards to prevent Amazon and other e-commerce companies from taking over India's commercial market.Amazon can sell its own products directly to its customers on its platform in the United States, but India’s laws restrict e-commerce websites from holding and selling their own products, which is a restriction to protecting small businesses. This means that Amazon can only charge product sales fees from Indian suppliers, and cannot directly establish separate transactions with manufacturers to create Amazon-branded products.
But Amazon has bypassed these restrictions by creating its own Indian seller company, the most prominent of which is called Cloudtail. Founded in 2014, Cloudtail is a subsidiary of a Bengaluru company called Prione Business Services, a joint venture between Amazon Asia Division and an Indian venture capital firm founded by N.R. Narayana Murthy, the billionaire founder of Infosys. 2021 survey found that Amazon is booming in India with a clever approach like Cloudtail. Although the country's Amazon market is packed with hundreds of thousands of sellers — big and small — by early 2019, 35 of them had already accounted for more than two-thirds of Amazon's online sales in India, benefiting from Amazon and big businesses.
Amazon has been trying to circumvent Indian laws, which angered Kandwal. “These companies are doing promotions throughout the year, and each promotion has unimaginable discounts,” he told Rest of World News, a nonprofit newspaper agency that reports on the impact of information technology on regions outside the Western world. "So, they are blatantly defiing policies and laws."
In 2018, the Modi government announced that it would take measures to further restrict e-commerce to prevent the development of large e-commerce platforms in India. The rules are specifically targeting foreign e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Flipkart, and they also do not allow these large companies to own more than 25% of the shares of seller entities such as Cloudtail. For Modi, the timing of the rule is crucial: He is running to ensure re-election of the Prime Minister. And for the BJP, small businessmen like Kandwal formed a strong voting bay and he could not alienate these people. The move appeased the small vendors and Kandwal, forcing Amazon to sell some shares in its two seller entities and caused temporary failures as some products—including Amazon-branded merchandise—are temporarily unavailable on the Indian version of the platform. By the time Bezos announced his visit to India in January 2020, his company's position in India had changed a lot.
So, the day after Kandwar saw the news that Bezos was about to visit India, he started to act at 5 a.m. He sent a message to the Prime Minister's Office staff, telling them that Bezos' visit would send a wrong signal to small businesses in India - Amazon would destroy small and medium-sized businesses immediately. He sent an email to Modi's office using the letterhead of the union , and he later shared the letter to the media. "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is eager to meet with the Prime Minister [sic] and is definitely eager to cover up unfair business activities in e-commerce," the letter reads.
Kandwal recalled: "We sent that letter not only to the Prime Minister, but also to the BJP Chairman, Home Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister. Soon, the ministers' phone calls began to come in. Local media also reported the matter. By 9 am, almost all important political functions in the BJP government had received letters from the trade lobby group in Kandwal urging them not to meet with Bezos.
Kandwal is a supporter of Modi.
lobbying worked. During the three-day itinerary in January 2020, Bezos did not meet with any minister or government official and Modi's office was said to have rejected his appointment. Kandwar and the Federation of Traders of India (CAIT) redoubled their efforts to arrange a protest near the Delhi venue where Bezos spoke. Kandwar and dozens of retailers shouted “Amazon Go back! Kandwal held his fist and shouted with a microphone.
Bezos's trip to India has changed significantly compared to the previous visit. The red carpet and Modi's Twitter are gone. This time, Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal publicly criticized Bezos's $1 billion commitment to helping small business businessmen.
Shortly after Bezos left the country, the Minister of Commerce met with Kandwal.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Kandwal family established their own trading business in Delhi and became rich by selling building materials. After the partition, India, when the country's economy was largely isolated from the global market, its business was to trade imports when India still had few imported products. Kandwal said: "Our family once imported everything - playing cards, key chains - because these things were not produced in India at the time.
Kandwal is good at political shows, and his stunts made him favored by local media that always longed for his colorful comments. He has become a regular topic on TV. Burning statues and sitting in the middle are a major part of his tactics; so is his Twitter , which is a never-ending contempt for e-commerce. But he is "related" and in a In a country where backers and bloodlines play an important role, the inheritances he inherited opened many doors for him.
The merchant class in India has a long history and is dominated by the Banier group of the castes of Vaisya . In the Hindu caste system, Banier is in the social class that deals with lending, banking and commodity trading. During the reign of Mughal , Banier was also integrated into the tradition of valuing commerce. Historian Syed Ali Nadim Rezavi (Syed) Ali Nadeem Rezavi wrote: “No transaction was conducted without their knowledge. "For many years, the Barnier caste has been successful in the trade industry, which has made them the most powerful business group in India. Many famous Indian business tycoons - Ambanis, Birlas, Jindals - all come from the Barnier caste. Their personal experience and investment industries are closely following the development trajectory of the Indian economy, which has continued to the Internet boom in India.
During the growth process, Kandwal always knew that he would join the family business in the future, but he never expected it to come so quickly. 19 In 75, when Kandwal was a teenager, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi put the country under a long state of lockdown, a state known as a "state of emergency". After war and political tensions with neighboring Pakistan Pakistan intensified, India fell into a 21-month moratorium on constitutional rights, during which Gandhi arrested thousands of political opposition.
Kandwal's father and uncle were heads of the family business, and they were also members of an emerging organization called the "People's Alliance of India" (Jana Sangh, the political department of the Indian nationalist civil-sponsible civil organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has been banned several times for being accused of spreading community hatred, has reshaped itself into a right-leaning youth organization in recent years. The movement moved underground during a state of emergency, and Kandwal's father was eventually arrested and tortured in prison for two years.
Kandwal still shed tears when he talked about this period of his life. At this point, he lost his usual enthusiastic look and recalled the fragile memories of his teenage years. He remembered going to prison once, and his father told him: "Although I know you are still a child, you have a responsibility on your shoulders." You have to go to the office to help your uncle regularly. ”
The businessman’s political stance was formed in the uncertainty under the “state of emergency” – the PLA joined by his father eventually became the BJP. Kandwal said his loyalty to the BJP has exceeded the scope of just voting for it. “It comes from the heart. We are closely linked because of ideology ."Kandwal worked in the student department of " National Volunteer Service Group " as a teenager, mingling with those who later became members of Modi. At that time, he had the talent of publicity, and he ran around for the student group to find media relations, wrote press releases, and handed the manuscript to the editors of media organizations.
Modi's overwhelming victory in 2014 made Kandwal excited. Right-wing Populist government has risen, and his own status as a trade leader has also been rising. But despite their shared Hindu nationalist ideology, Modi's desire to introduce foreign investment into India has divided Kandwal with the BJP's economic policies. Kandwal believes that increasing welfare and focusing on retail and trade in India's own country is the way forward.
According to political scientist and writer Vinay Sitapati Sitapati) argues that Hindu nationalism “has no ideological viewpoint in terms of economics. "Although the political theory of nationalism requires organizing and uniting Hindu society and establishing a fixed vote bay, Sitapati said that Hindu nationalists have a relatively vague view of governance and foreign policy issues. Most of India's modern history has adopted the closed-door and self-reliance economic policy of the Indian National Assembly Party. Before Modi came to power, it was always the Congress Party in charge of India. This triggered widespread social unrest and economic stagnation, which eventually led to the financial crisis of 1991, which prompted India to gradually try to open up free trade. Some factions of the BJP strongly opposed reforms in the early 1990s. The vacuum of ideological causes "in the past 50-60 years, the various leaders of the BJP have different views on the economy," Sitapati said, "and these views are contradictory." "Modi stood firmly in the reform camp even before he took office as prime minister. During his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat, he invited large foreign companies to build manufacturing in Gujarat, which is often believed to have changed Gujarat. Under his leadership, today's BJP is full of enthusiasm for a market-oriented economy. In addition to the occasional self-reliance posture, Modi's policy generally welcomes privatization and foreign investment.
"The BJP has had a political awareness from the beginning that if it is seen as a right-wing party in India economically (rather than socially) it would be detrimental to win the election," Sitapati said. Upper caste businessmen like Kandwal "still exert some influence due to historical reasons, but this influence has not translated into protectionist policies. ”
This puts Kandwal and the Federation of Indian Traders in a very awkward battle. The battle puts them on the opposite side of Modi's economic policy. The lobby — including Kandwal — made its mark in 2018 when they threatened a nationwide demonstration against Walmart's acquisition of a majority stake in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart for $16 billion. They called the deal a "cancer" for retail and lobbying regulators to review the acquisition, but the Modi government , Ministry of Industry and Commerce and the Competition Commission of India have also contributed to the deal. Since its acquisition, Flipkart’s users have increased from 10 million to about 108 million. With Amazon and Flipkart’s expansion in India, certain industries in the retail market have been particularly impacted, including retailers of personal electronics. By 2020, one in every two phones in India was sold online, which puts physical retailers in a strait.
For example, Arvinder For mobile phone sellers like Khurana, the transition is cruel. Before e-commerce became popular, Kurana said, “I don’t even have time to eat, we have to keep selling things standing. But after 2015, when Amazon and Flipkart started selling exclusive smartphone models online with big discounts, retailers like Kurana were completely unable to compete with. Kurana said: "I noticed that the kids of my main customers came to the store, but didn't buy phones.""They will check their phones in my store and place orders online. "He said that among the cheapest smartphones, 25 phones don't even authorize offline stores to sell.
retailers rush to buy online just to get exclusive stock. Kurana described the owners staggeringly using more than 30 credit cards and ID cards to buy phones that can only be ordered online. But (more professional) professional gunmen are the last straw that crushes these owners: According to the All India Mobile Retailers Association, more than 40,000 mobile phone stores have closed since 2019. Kurana closed three of his stores and fired employees who worked there. He lamented that they are now "drive taxis with Uber, and some people get haircuts in salons." "Educated people are expelled from the industry. ”
In response, Indian authorities have gradually begun to take action against e-commerce platforms. In January 2020, the week when Bezos visited India, India’s antitrust regulator launched a formal investigation into Amazon and Flipkart based on complaints received from a trading group in New Delhi . Kandwar, Kurana and other affected traders said the platform affected prices through large discounts and exclusive partnerships, especially in mobile phone sales, and gave them preferential treatment by helping designated sellers reach deals with manufacturers.
When reporters contacted Rest of A spokesperson for Amazon India region declined to comment during World News. In a press release in April this year, the company said more than 50,000 offline retailers and community stores sold goods on Amazon’s platform, creating nearly 300,000 “direct and indirect” jobs for India since January 2020.
The investigation was put on hold before the committee began investigating whether these exclusive arrangements violated Indian antitrust laws, and the investigation was put on hold. A Reuters 2021 investigation reignited calls from offline retailers to continue the investigation. A court said the investigation confirmed the Amazon's allegations of differential treatment of sellers. After the report was released, Kandwal called for "immediate ban on Amazon's operations in India" and once again called for new rules to limit e-commerce. His appeal attracted media attention, but the thunder and rains were small. Although there was a big fanfare against Bezos, there was no other movement.
In May 2020, when most parts of the world were still suffering from the impact of the new crown epidemic on health and supply chains, India lifted the national lockdown and was relatively unaffected. Optimistic policy makers expect that India's recovery path will take a V-shaped structure stimulated by Modi's "India First" recovery policy. "Speak for the local" (Vocal) For Local, not only buying local products, but also supporting them) has become the government's mantra. "The COVID-19 crisis has made us realize the value of local manufacturing, local markets and local supply chains," Modi said in a televised speech to the country. "Localization is not only our need, but our responsibility. ”
During the first wave of lockdown, Kandwal saw his friends and neighbors turn to online shopping, which for him was a signal of action that he could finally implement his own idea of brewing for years: to operate his own local e-commerce platform. In September 2020, the All-Indian Federation of Traders launched the Bharata Electronics Market. The purpose of the platform is to “put the shops near you closer to you, just click the mouse,” a press release about the platform reads.
Kandwal hopes to build his own e-commerce platform during the pandemic
The concept of "Barhattan Electronic Market" envisioned by Kandwal is simple: this market is an online platform for Kirana (Indian version of convenience store), that is, the corner store where Indian families buy most of their daily necessities, and sellers do not need to pay commissions. In the "Barhattan Electronic Market", sellers from all walks of life can create their own electronic stores, provide customers with private discounts, and in theory can also expand a larger customer base.Kandwal explained that users on the platform can shop at any store within 3 miles from them by simply entering their area code. Although he has been conceiving such a platform for many years, the time-honored store owners are unwilling to change. "The COVID-19 pandemic is a blessing," Kandwal said. "Now every seller, every Tom, Dick and Harry, is aware of the power of e-commerce."
But it is hard to imagine that the "Barhat Electronics Market" can compete with companies such as Amazon and Flipkart, because even local competitors can build their own platform. The website was built by a team of five coders from the city of Indore, a city known for its cotton and textile industries, not encoders. The platform’s founding members are mostly old-school traders in their 50s. As head of the “Barhat Electronic Market,” Kandwal runs the website more politicized than an e-commerce startup. He selected 56 more famous local businessmen, who he called "e-commerce warriors", and they held seminars to train suppliers how to register and use his platform. He described his colleagues as "volunteers" who were "loyal" and "honest" people, which reflected Gandhi's selfless dedication and was completely different from profit-driven market behavior.
"These 56 people will continue to promote in China, so that more people can understand the Bharatan electronic market and attract people to join," Kandwal said.
But e-commerce is developing very slowly, leaving Kandwal and traders like him on the defensive, which currently accounts for only 2% of the Indian retail industry. For Amazon, revenue from India is relatively small, even compared to other foreign markets such as Japan. In 2020, India accounted for only 2.2% of Amazon's global commodity value, according to Forrester, a research and consulting firm in the United States. In other words, local competitors have a lot of room for development. Reliance of Mukesh Ambani and Indian industrial giant Tata Group have recently entered the e-commerce market—both companies have acquired majority stakes in some of the key local startups in recent years. Amazon and Reliance are fighting an extremely critical lawsuit, trying to compete for control of a $3.4 billion Indian supermarket chain in a bid to consolidate their stake in the online retail market.
In addition to large conglomerates, hundreds of well-funded and ambitious local startups are also helping millions of Indian convenience stores on street corners to digitalize. Fynd is such a platform, founded in 2012. Co-founder Hash Shah hopes to help offline retailers sell products directly in their stores and be able to work with third-party platforms such as Amazon. Shah, 32, graduated from the famous Indian Institute of Technology , is more in line with the image of the e-commerce platform than Kandwal and his cadres. Shah said that while the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 forced them to take action, traders “should have done it long ago. I think we have wasted too much time due to distrust and contempt for e-commerce and technology… not viewed it as a new way of operating.” Shah believes that the future of small shop owners is a combination of online and offline sales. He said that large platforms “can never copy” the inventory sources of small stores and the accumulated customer stickiness. Hash's Fynd platform is now dominated by Reliance Industries, which acquired 87.6% of the company's stake in in 2019.
"Baratha Electronic Market" pales in comparison. Kandwal knew what the platform wouldn't do, but he didn't know what it should do. He said that their platform will not have foreign investment or Chinese products, and only Indians are working hard to build the platform. Unlike Amazon that lists "customer stickiness" as one of its key principles, Kandwal said in the platform's online video that "Barata Electronics Market" is "a platform for sellers, relying on sellers, for sellers." Although Kandwal said 100,000 sellers have signed the initiative, the portal is not open to customers and is expected to be put into use in the coming months.
This puts Kandwal and the sellers he works with are in jeopardy. Even though he had quite a lot of relationships within the BJP, the middle-aged businessman thought the BJP could do more. “Six months later, there will be some changes,” he said, but not as optimistic as usual. "But of course, so far, merchants have not received the treatment they deserve in India, even though they are providing the best service possible to the Indian people."
He is unwilling to criticize the Modi government, but the rules of the BJP tie him up, and he has been fighting a large, expanding and increasingly profitable industry for the past seven years and has become exhausted. Kandwal believes that this war was part of a long time ago when the British colonized and plundered India, which put many of the merchant class into poverty. Therefore, he was always skeptical of foreigners carrying briefcases.
For Kandwar, his family has always been firmly supporting the BJP. For generations, Modi's "New India" policy has been designed to benefit businessmen like him. He regards his belief and trade business as one, and his loyalty to both is reflected in his loyalty to Modi himself - he uses the photo of him sitting next to the Prime Minister on WhatsApp. But as India opens its market to foreign competitors, he may find that Modi's new India will be at the expense of him.
NILESH CHRISTOPHER is a journalist based in Bangalore, India, focusing on the impact of technology on Indian society.
(This article was published on the Rest of World website on June 10, 2021, and translated by Liu Siyu.)
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