There might be more to the delivery workers ‘strike’ than meets the eye.
Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has alleged that ‘agents of political interests’ have been violently forcing their delivery partners to stop working during the ‘strike’ called by some sections of the delivery workforce. Goyal shared videos on X, which showed how delivery partners were being violently prevented from working by forcibly taking away their food orders and deflating the tyres of their vehicles.
“I am all for peaceful protests against anything and everything. But violent protests and stopping others who want to work from working is not okay (proof attached),” Goyal said on X.
“Here’s what we know – a number of these protestors were not even our delivery partners. They were agents of political interests, piggybacking on the narrative to gain political mileage,” he said.
Goyal shared three videos as proof of delivery partners being forced to comply with the so-called strike. In the first video, a delivery partner’s food is snatched away as he looks to deliver it. He’s told about the strike, and when he says he wants to deliver, he is threatened with having his bike’s tyres deflated. In the second video, some protestors throw away a deliver partner’s food order, which leads to an altercation between them. In the third video, a delivery partner shows off where he was presumably injured by these political goons, and says that they tried to steal his phone as well.
AAP’s Raghav Chadha has been at the forefront of leading these protests. He’s been making a show of sitting with delivery partners and looking to amplify their concerns. And while in a free society, people are free to strike as they wish, if delivery partners are being prevented from working by politically motivated groups, it is something that law enforcement authorities should look into and fix — with lakhs of delivery partners willingly working with these startups to earn an honest living, local governments must ensure that those wishing to continue delivering must be allowed to do so.