“Amazon Go Back”: Meet the Indian merchant waging war on Jeff Bezos
O n the eve of the Hindu festival of Holi this year, 10 men gathered outside a jewelry shop in the north Indian city of Kanpur carrying effigies. The cardboard statues, created to burn as part of a tradition of the festival, were five feet tall with pink heads and twirled mustaches on their faces. On the torsos, the men stapled an image of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
The men were part of a live demonstration organized by Praveen Khandelwal, a Delhi-based businessman who leads a network of roughly 80 million small business owners called the Confederation of All India Traders, or CAIT. While the men in Kanpur prepared their effigies of Bezos, hundreds of other traders around the country displayed their own in a Zoom call (the demonstration was meant to be held in-person, but India was on the verge of a deadly second wave of Covid-19 cases, and cities across the country were already in lockdown). Some of the businessmen video-called from inside their own stores, others were perched on their balconies and terraces, and some just stood on the street. Many had their own cardboard versions of the world’s richest man: a shopkeeper and his two young children held a headshot of Bezos on the Zoom call, along with a cutout of the multi-headed demon king Ravana with “AMAZON” emblazoned across his chest.
On Khandelwal’s cue, they set their effigies of Bezos ablaze. During Holi, the effigy burning represents the destruction of the demoness Holika, an annual triumph of good over evil. For the shopkeepers and traders, Bezos was the demon to burn this year.
