Controversies and criticism
The WestBridge case is the most serious matter on his record, because it is litigation rather than commentary. The dispute is about whether an investor that put 166 crore rupees into Shaadi.com in 2006 is entitled to force the sale of the entire company after the listing that was promised within five years never happened. Mittal's position, argued before the National Company Law Tribunal and then in Indian courts, is that WestBridge is improperly trying to use a drag-along clause to hand the company to a competitor, Info Edge, with the help of other directors. WestBridge's position, argued in arbitration seated in Singapore, is that the contract says exactly what it says. [2]
The caste filter controversy is the second. In February 2020 the service was accused in the United Kingdom of allowing users to exclude Scheduled Castes, which critics described as discrimination that would break the Equality Act 2010. The company's defence, that the filter is a proxy for lifestyle fitment and does not remove anyone from the platform, was widely reported and widely criticised, and the episode is the clearest example of a criticism aimed at the product rather than at the man. [2]
His television persona has generated a third kind of criticism, aimed at the format of which he is a part. Shark Tank India's investments are commitments made on camera, and the amounts announced by the judges are not always the amounts that reach the companies on the terms shown. Mittal has been the most combative of the panel and therefore the most quoted in the disputes that follow, and his own framing of his method, in which he backs founders rather than plans, is a defence of judgement rather than of paperwork. [4]
A fourth, smaller line of criticism concerns the show's second order effects. Because he is both a sitting investor in hundreds of startups and a judge on national television, companies he backs get visibility that companies he does not back cannot buy, and that combination has no real precedent in Indian television. He has never disputed the point; he has argued that the visibility is good for the ecosystem regardless of who receives it. [1] [4]
Finally, there is the matter of how long the answers have taken. The WestBridge dispute was unresolved in 2024, more than seven years after talks began, and Shaadi.com has never listed. For a founder who built one of the first Indian consumer internet businesses, the fact that the company has neither gone public nor been sold is itself the criticism his rivals make most often. [2]
