‘Conditional’ Citizens? Hawkers in the Streets (and the Courts) of Contemporary India

Abstract

Street vendors have often been seen as archetypal examples of informality in cities—constituting what Chatterjee (2004), for instance, has called political society—indispensable to the city, but continually having to negotiate the law, their claims to citizenship perpetually tenuous. Using Chatterjee’s framework as a guide, I look at how the movement for street vendors’ rights has evolved in India over the last few decades. I have studied the legal as well as political struggle waged by various street vendors’ groups over the last decade, which eventually culminated in a national law legalizing street vending in India in 2014. That this law was passed amid increasingly strong aspirations for (hawker-free) 'world-class' cities on the part of the middle class is in itself significant, but shows, more importantly, how the Indian street vendor, far from seeking exceptions to the law, is increasingly demanding to be let in to the governmental gaze of the state. Although there have been many problems with the implementation of the bill since its passage, I argue that by institutionalizing a right to vend, the campaign which led to the bill has created new possibilities for vendors to negotiate with the state at all levels.