Though his attempted transformation of Flipkart had nearly brought disaster, Sachin was still convinced that his ideas had been sound, his vision exemplary. He blamed ‘bad execution’ for their failure. He blamed the senior leaders he had trusted. And he blamed Amazon’s ‘capital dumping’ at a December 2016 technology conference arranged by Carnegie India. When Flipkart was at its peak, Sachin had taunted Jeff Bezos. A little more than two years later, Sachin was now asking for sanctuary from Amazon. Denouncing American companies such as Amazon and Uber at the Carnegie conference, he called for India to adopt China’s model of banning foreign internet companies in the country: ‘What we need to do is what at some level China did. They told the world that we need your capital but we don’t need your companies.’10
The idealism of Flipkart’s early years long gone, the bravado of the subsequent years exhausted, Sachin had been reduced to calling for government protection against his former employer. Strictly speaking, Flipkart itself wasn’t an Indian company – its holding company was registered in Singapore – but this was a technicality. Flipkart may not have even been founded had it not been for Amazon, which had once employed Sachin and Binny. This kind of hypocrisy is hardly uncommon in business. Indeed, Sachin’s willingness to ignore all these truths may have been a manifestation of the street smartness of a young entrepreneur with the ability to play dirty, if need be, against one of the most powerful companies in the world. But what his statement clearly betrayed was the real agenda of his mission to create The Great Indian Internet Company: it was simply another capitalist’s pursuit of wealth and power packaged in noble rhetoric, the Indian equivalent of the deceptive ‘we will change the world’11 messaging of American internet companies.
The Chinese model that Sachin was advocating would no doubt enrich entrepreneurs and their startups, but it would come at a cost, which for any democracy would be unacceptable. China is known to use its homegrown companies and their technologies to enforce authoritarian measures through Orwellian schemes of surveillance, propaganda and restrictions on free speech.
In November 2016, about a month before Sachin spoke at the Carnegie conference, the BJP government had announced that it would, with almost immediate effect, demonetize ₹500 and ₹1000 banknotes. The justification given by the prime minister was that this move would destroy ‘black money’ and exact revenge upon traitors who had for years cheated the country by hiding income.12 A high and forceful wave of nationalism was sweeping through India. One can’t be sure if Sachin was intending to ride on it – he had been thinking of creating a lobby group for Indian startups even before demonetization. But it was a disturbing conflation – the idea of technology companies that store massive quantities of information about citizens receiving patronage by a government whose authoritarian tendencies have been widely criticized.
In the 1950s, Nehru had labelled dams, factories, power plants and other large technological industrial projects by public sector companies as the new ‘temples’ of India.13 More than sixty years later, twenty-five years after India liberalized its economy, public sector companies were irrelevant in the technological arena. In the internet age, globally, a country’s technological prowess was increasingly being measured by the success of its private technology companies. For the US, it was Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In China, it was Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. In 2014, Sachin had been determined to put Flipkart in that league. Two and a half years later, when his dream was in tatters, his technological vision rejected by customers, colleagues and investors, it was expedient to call for protection. The seed for the Flipkart project – the idea that Indian engineers can create a world-class internet company – had thus germinated into a nation-building exercise that India was neglecting to nurture at its own cost. This evocation of the Chinese model was an instance of the formulation that, years later, one of India’s best-known intellectuals would describe as the ‘RSS meets Jio’ ideological world.”14
In any case, the viability of Sachin’s mission rested primarily on his ability to deliver massive amounts of wealth to its shareholders, a basic principle of capitalism. And Sachin, a fervent capitalist, had lost the confidence of his shareholders, the people higher up in the capitalist chain who no longer believed in his mission.
At the end of 2016, the Flipkart investors had, in fact, begun persuading Sachin’s co-founder, Binny, to hand over the daily running of the company to Kalyan. Lee, Kalyan and a couple of other key Flipkart shareholders were relentless in this pursuit. It took just a few weeks. In early January 2017, exactly one year after he had taken over from Sachin, Binny succumbed. Sachin’s opinion on the matter hardly counted. Starting in 2012, Flipkart had made drastic management changes at the end of every year. The tradition would continue.
Just like the previous year, on the second Monday of 2017, Flipkart announced its management changes. The company elevated Kalyan Krishnamurthy as its new CEO. Kalyan, who would turn forty-five later that week, couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. Binny was given the Group CEO position, in light of the fact that Flipkart was shaping up as an internet conglomerate. Apart from its eponymous business, it owned two fashion-selling sites, Myntra and Jabong, as well as the mobile payment app PhonePe, which was picking up nicely, having received an unexpected boost from demonetization. Kalyan as well as the CEOs of Myntra, Jabong and PhonePe, would report to Binny. As was the case even earlier, Kalyan was really answerable to only one man: Lee Fixel. Still, Binny’s position wasn’t
