Hawker eviction drive in Kolkata: New government, old playbook
The story of Kolkata’s hawkers goes back to successive waves of displacement that reshaped the city in the mid-20th century. The Bengal famine of 1943 and Partition in 1947 brought thousands of impoverished migrants and refugees to a city ill-equipped to absorb them.
Nearly 30 years after Operation Sunshine, as a new government follows an old playbook, Kolkata’s pavements continue to bear the weight of two competing visions of urbanisation: the desire for a more orderly city and the need to accommodate those who survive in its informal economy.
In the early hours of November 24, 1996, bulldozers — overseen by officers of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, cadres of the ruling CPI(M), and police — moved through Calcutta’s arterial streets from the north to the south, reducing to rubble thousands of makeshift stalls. A day before, Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty had met with hawker-union leaders and assured them that any eviction would necessarily include peaceful rehabilitation. The promise proved hollow. Operation Sunshine, the brainchild of Chakraborty and senior Left leader Kanti Ganguly, was set into motion. Defending the eviction drive, Chakraborty argued that reclaiming public spaces from encroachment was essential to make the city more orderly and attractive to investors and tourists in a new era of economic liberalisation. Three decades later, as a new BJP government in the state undertakes hawker eviction drives, this time with no mention of rehabilitation, the echoes of 1996 are difficult to ignore. Framed as a reclamation of public space to bring about civic order, then — as now — the question remains how a city built on informal labour can reconcile competing claims to urban space.
The story of Kolkata’s hawkers goes back to successive waves of displacement that reshaped the city in the mid-20th century. The Bengal famine of 1943 and Partition in 1947 brought thousands of impoverished migrants and refugees to a city ill-equipped to absorb them. Unlike Delhi, which benefited from substantial central assistance for refugee rehabilitation, Calcutta was largely left to improvise. The grinding poverty gave birth to a new form of enterprise: pavement vending. It required little capital and offered an immediate livelihood. Many of the newcomers took to selling vegetables, fish, fabric, sweets, even books, along the city’s pavements. The hawker — derived from the German hōker (meaning to peddle or squat) — had arrived.
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