RSS affiliate demands closure of Amazon, Flipkart

The 15th annual Rashtriya Sabha of SJM held in Gwalior during December 24-26 passed a resolution to ask the government to declare all activities of the e-commerce majors in India to be illegal.

SJM alleges that both Amazon and Walmart/Flipkart are blatantly contravening and operating uncontrolled in India. “It's well known that Amazon and Flipkart hold 80% of online space. Discounts offered by them are adversely impacting offline markets also. They are luring customers by offering high discounts, advertising aggressively to communicate such offers to the general public. The public is attracted to them more for a discount than the convenience. This trend is adversely impacting the neighbourhood shops and kirana stores. Along with this, people engaged in wholesale and transport sector are also getting adversity affected by e-commerce giants”, SJM has said in a statement.

The organization wants allegations against the firms to be investigated by the CBI. “As soon as there is a trace of the government officers including people sitting in the high offices, gaining from these companies, directly or indirectly, they should be sent on leave to facilitate fair investigation of the whole matter; and be punished for their offences”, SJM has demanded.

According to SJM, it is time for auditing the financial documents of e-commerce companies, and make public the findings to clear the doubt that they are illegally doing e-commerce business, under the guise of the platform in India, by giving huge discounts based on foreign funds i.e. based on 'cash-burning model', and capturing the markets.

The other issue was the preference Amazon gives to a selected group of sellers including Cloudtail and Appario to hurt small retailers bypassing Indian FDI Regulations. “Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competitive products and brands such as Solimo and Amazon Basics. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is another operation being carried by Amazon in India to exploit the retailers by charging very heavy fees in the garb of helping them in improving their presence on e-marketplace.

"Amazon compels small suppliers to hold a substantial minimum quantity of their range of products at its fulfilment centres. These suppliers are also required to pay for the warehousing, transportation etc. It has resulted in very high inventory cost for vendors”, SJM said.

The organization accused Amazon of paying bribes by way of legal and commercial fees. “Amazon has hired many law firms for its legal business activities. Amazon pays huge legal fees to these law companies, and after that, these companies transfer that fee to some other company and after that, a link is formed and finally, the final legal company or lawyer or any professional withdraws the amount in cash to the concerned official. This work is done so efficiently that there is no case for outright bribery by the company. It has to be understood that this is a very serious matter. This also proves that all licenses and permissions obtained by such companies were obtained fraudulently using unfair means”, the SJM statement alleges.