| Source – http://www.doccentre.org |
| Culture, Consumption, Middle Class and Hawkers
Groups who are outside the ambit of formal citizenship rights, manage to be heard by the state, not by arguing for the liberal rights of individuals, but by making demands based on group rights and community identity. (Partha Chatterjee). The pheriwala is one extraordinary class of citizen-subjects that the developmentalist (and now liberalising) state in India produces as a vulnerable category of persons. Pheriwalas are entrepreneurs..but the condition of their survival is that they remain marginal and de-humanised… What becomes controversial is not the inhuman treatment of pheriwalas or the grotesque form of modernisation. The criticism are in fact aesthethic and political: street vendors are seen as offensive, inconvenient, and illegitimate. Attempts to impose order on city spaces are also about the value of the real estate involved. In a time of unchecked urban growth, the pheriwala becomes a symbol of metropolitan space gone out of control. As such they become the exemplary image of an unattainable disciplinary project. A Climate of terror is instilled through demolition and destruction, illuminating the despotic character of state power under market liberalisation. If the licence-permit raj has been lifted for rich industrialists, why has it not been lifted on the smallest players in capitalism? Why are the poor still in chains? The Railways, pride of many swadeshis, too has succumbed to the pressures of the free market. A group of 25 vendors have filed a petition in Delhi High Court alleging that the Railways’ policy of 1992 of allowing multinationals and big Indian companies from setting up shops and kiosks at the railway station is detrimental to their business interest. “Belligerent hawkers have converted the footpaths into a virtual no-entry zone for pedestrians”. “officials of the BMC defend their lack of action. They point to the Supreme Court’s recently served contempt notices to the civic administration, asking it to temporarily stop evicting hawkers”. In a controversial move, the BMC is toying with the idea of reserving 20 per cents of open plots meant for gardens. Playgrounds andmarkets for hawkers to sell their wares. The BMC has proposed that it be allowed to concentrate its efforts on removing hawkers from the non-hawking zones. Lawyer-activist Raju Moray however says that barring the few non-hawking zones, the hawkers are free to camp anywhere! BMC feels that … “The residents although eager to patronise hawkers do not want them in front of their premises”. |