Samuel Johnson got it wrong: Patriotism is the last refuge of the unprofitable. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Online Services Pvt. lost 23 billion rupees last year, and so its co-founder and executive chairman, Sachin Bansal, has suddenly morphed into a great champion of local companies. “We need to take a more India-centric approach” to regulation, he told a Bengaluru audience last week, citing Donald Trump approvingly.
Bansal is leading an effort to lobby the Indian government to raise new barriers to foreign competition. He has plenty of global examples to back up his argument. Besides Donald Trump, there’s China: “What we need to do is what China did and tell the world we need your capital, but we don’t need your companies,” he said. Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of the taxi aggregator Ola, which lost 8 billion rupees last year, has joined Bansal’s lobbying group. “The markets are being distorted by [foreign] capital,” he complained during the same Bengaluru discussion.
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