Late last week, I wrote a piece responding to Deepinder Goyal’s tweets on how he views India’s gig economy. It went viral – and as is inevitable with anything that does, it brought with it an equal measure of bouquets and brickbats.

Since then, I have been labelled a communist, a leftist, and a Marxist, for pointing out the large holes in Goyal’s arguments. I have also been told that I don’t understand what capitalism is – or how a free market works. Of course, along with this there has been some abuse as well – words that can’t be published here.

The most amusing of these was the claim that since Deepinder Goyal – the founder of Eternal – the company behind Zomato and Blinkit – has made a lot of money in life, he necessarily knows what he is talking about. And since I haven’t, my thinking, apparently, doesn’t really count.

Interestingly, many of the people accusing me of not understanding capitalism would swear by Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher who turned the entrepreneur into a moral hero. Rand believed that profit was not a dirty word but a signal of value creation. In her novels and non-fiction, entrepreneurs earned rewards by solving real problems for willing customers, not by relying on hidden subsidies or a desperate labour force.

All this has led to this piece, in which I try examining whether what the likes of Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart, and others are doing, can really be labelled free-market capitalism. Or is it something else being passed off as capitalism? Indeed, are we witnessing a high-speed exploitation engine merely dressed in free-market clothing?

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