Jeff Bezos, Mukesh Ambani in battle over Future Group

A vanilla commercial dispute is setting the stage for a clash between the world’s No. 1 and No. 6 richest men. But the legal wrangling is a sideshow. What Jeff Bezos and Mukesh Ambani are really fighting over is pole position in the only billion-plus-people consumer market available to both of them: India.

The ostensible battleground is a $3.4 billion deal Indian tycoon Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. stitched up in August to acquire assets of debt-laden local retailer Future Group. Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc. is trying to block the transaction.

That, in itself, is a bit of a dampener. Expectations were building for the two billionaires to work together. In September, Bloomberg News reported that Ambani had given Amazon an option to buy as much as 40% of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd.