Old Vs New
Kolkata’s Hawkers
Ritaiyoti Bandyopadhyay
In June this year, the
Mamata Banerjee Government
in West Bengal waged a battle against “unlawful encroachments” by hawkers, pavement dwellers, petty contractors, etc. in Kolkata, Howrah, and several notable towns dotting the state. Once again, the mainstream media started celebrating the bulldozer-in-motion, as they had done in 1996-1997, when the Left Front Government demolished street-side stalls in Calcutta close to 21 major intersections. The Left Front codenamed the drive “Operation Sunshine.” As any dweller of Kolkata will tell you, the “operation” failed to “eliminate” the hawkers. Slowly but steadily, they reclaimed their footpath. Even those who received rehabilitation deserted the new site and returned under the banner of the Hawker Sangram Committee, a federation of several dozens of local unions.
‘Operation Sunshine’ was the beginning of the end of the CPI(M). Within a decade or so, the Singur-Nandigram-Lalgarh agitation happened and Mamata Banerjee emerged as the supreme political authority in the state. The current eviction drive, too, gives out a message to the ruling establishment, and the new opposition seems to have begun to capitalise on the sentiment of those who lost their stalls and dwellings. Empowered by various Central Government loan schemes targeted at the urban sub-proletariat, the opposition might not be far behind. The Opposition leader in the Assembly has vowed to obstruct the bulldozer if more evictions take place. He says eviction should follow some protocol!
Old vs New Hawkers
The hawkers who occupied the carriageway as opposed to the footpath are generally the ‘new’ ones. They occupied the carriageways of many streets in the initial years of Mamata Banerjee’s coming to power, and once again, in good numbers, after the pandemic-era “lockdown” was lifted. These hawkers are dependent on the government and the ruling party, more so than their footpath counterparts, who can demand some form of legal recognition thanks to the Street Vendors Act 2014. The ‘new’ hawkers, on the other hand, have no legal basis for their occupancy. This makes them remain dependent upon the government and the party. If the party-government complex decides to eliminate them, there is nothing much that they can do.
Unlike the slum and squatter colony dwellers, the hawkers usually do not vote as a consolidated constituency for the simple reason that they vote where they live. In that sense, they cannot constitute themselves as a classic urban vote bank. Usually, they have a different deal with the dominant political establishments (in all cities of India). The more one occupies a frontal location the better is the rental potential of the plot but more vulnerability in legal terms. Occupancy in the carriageway commands more visibility than the footpath and the legal retail shop. But, at the same time, it comes at the cost of traffic flow and hence almost impossible to be legalised or even officially acknowledged. This group is politically sustained and yet legally abandoned. They cannot be given a license or even be officially enumerated. They exist and do not exist at the same time. They constitute an excess and Mamata Banerjee rules the street through this excess.
Apart from paying rent to the local political leaders and clubs, the new hawkers are also an invaluable asset to keep the footpath hawkers—the old ones—politically under control. If they protest too much, they can still be evicted and their plots can be distributed to the hawkers on the carriageways. Despite central legislation in their favour, these hawkers still belong to the ambiguous zone of legality and illegality.
Hawkers’ Collectives in Kolkata
In Kolkata, footpath hawkers have a long tradition of independent unions. By the 1960s, the hawkers came up with several dozens of unions, each representing a bunch of streets. These unions were often headed by locally notable Congress leaders who would act as the link between the government and the unions. There were several unions close to smaller left parties (in fact, the first hawkers’ union in the city was founded by Hemanta Basu of Forward Bloc in 1952), but a very few with the main opposition, the CPI(M). After 1977, the Forward Bloc, CPI, and RSP saw a substantial gain, but the hawkers largely stayed away from the CPI(M).
Ever since Operation Sunshine, the Hawker Sangram Committee and the National Hawker Federation have worked to create and retain relative political autonomy. On several occasions, the Hawker Sangram Committee supported other sections of the sub-proletariat, when they faced eviction threats. These movements kept a vibrant political discourse alive in the city around livelihood. This writer is a witness to how Saktiman Ghosh and his associates worked tirelessly to earn central legislation for the hawkers. Unlike the unions in the transport sector, which have always been aligned with the ruling party, the hawkers’ unions, until recently, managed to maintain a relative independence from the ruling party.
As Mamata Banerjee came to power, hawkers began to feel secure. After all, Mamata Banerjee captured state power with an unwritten contract with the marginal peasants and hawkers that she would protect them from big capital. This sense of security seems to have eroded the hawkers’ political autonomy. Perhaps, the footpath hawkers started trusting Mamata Banerjee more than their unions which did not pay.
Mamata Banerjee’s Street Politics
Before the Singur-Nandigram agitation, Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress were predominantly an urban force, with a solid popular base in Kolkata. It’s often argued that Mamata’s mastery over street politics gave her unparalleled political prominence when she was still an opposition leader. After coming to power, Mamata Banerjee took care to preserve her street-fighter image. It is important to remember that she was closely mentored by Youth Congress leaders during the Siddhartha Sankar Ray era, and her street politics does carry some traces of that inheritance—the club-puja-street economy complex supervised by locally influential leaders. If these leaders become too powerful and run the rental economy of the streets according to their volition, they deserve some disciplining from the supreme leader. The crucial necessity of the rental economy and its disciplining by the supremo to build larger hegemony is part of the same process, and the one cannot be seen in isolation from the other. The so-called promise of protecting the poor from the Big Capital comes along with this.
It must be kept in mind that nobody other than Banerjee commands political legitimacy on behalf of her party. People may dispute with the local leaders, but her legitimacy doesn’t get questioned in any effective manner. She harbours an affective proximity with the “people” and relates with them as one of them and yet singular—subaltern and yet exceptional. Whenever there is a natural calamity or an incidence of fire, or a disaster, the supreme leader will be ‘seen’ surveying the area, talking to people, rushing to the hospital, and so forth. She will make sure that she reaches early on and “takes over” the charge from the bureaucrats and the “corruptible” local leadership. Mamata Banerjee is good at cultivating this relationship—this bonding with the citizens. Such a display of proximity with the citizens enables Mamata to distance herself from the “corrupt” local leaders. They can afford to make mistakes, but Mamata knows how to compensate for the loss. This display of care and affection is central to the everyday renewal of her legitimacy.
Mamata’s political uniqueness lies in her ambiguous and almost indescribable ideological stance, characterised by a blend of seemingly contradictory tendencies: she is at once an authoritarian populist much like many of her counterparts in many states, and yet she is also a democratic politician. Despite her occasional support to the BJP during the Vajpayee era, she manages to retain strong secular credentials to the extent that she could be charged with ‘minority appeasement’ by the majoritarian Opposition in the state. She doesn’t claim her secular credentials in the CPI (M) way though—she does it by becoming a Muslim, a Christian, and a Sikh during their holy festivals, while remaining a Kali temple-going Hindu in the rest of the year. She defends people’s rights against big capital while allowing various chit fund organisations to plunder the lower middle class and the sub-proletariat alike. Yet, her vote bank among these sections seems to have remained untarnished, perhaps because of bank transfers and the fact that her voters understand that there is no cleaner path for capital accumulation and election funding.
Hawkers are not to be Taken for Granted
Having talked to some hawker-interlocutors (The author has been working with them for the last 15 years), one gathers the impression that this drive is to assert Banerjee’s control over the local overlords, to give the urban propertied class an assurance that she still exists, and to listen to the voice of the footpath hawkers and legal retailers, who, for a while, have been vocal about the spectacular expansion of hawkers on the carriageways (and not footpaths). It seems Banerjee is doing an act of balancing.
Yet, she should not take the urban sub-proletariat for granted. Ever since she came to prominence, this section of the population remained one of the most ardent support bases for her—electoral and otherwise. One shouldn’t forget that just after Operation Sunshine, Banerjee floated a new party, cashing in on her street fighter image during the eviction drive. In 1999, the AITC won four parliamentary seats in Kolkata, covering about 120 corporation wards. In 2000, the AITC won Kolkata’s municipal elections after three consecutive terms by the Left Front. It will be politically suicidal for the AITC to lose this support base. If Banerjee goes too far with this drive, which is unlikely, she will definitely signal her exit from the social contract which once brought her to power.
[Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay is an urban historian based in Chandigarh. He is the author of Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. The opinion is personal and it, in no way, conveys the voice of the institution(s) he is professionally attached with.]
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Vol 57, No. 15 - 18, Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2024 |