Calcutta is the last city in the world, and in history, to still have hand-rickshaws in operation. Since the early 1980s, the leftist government of the state of West Bengal has been fitfully—more recently with increasing determination—seizing so-called “unlicensed” rickshaws, declaredly in the name of law and order and of modernizing and improving the city in this era of instant liberalization. In formal terms some attempt has been made to replace the services lost to the city—but none to ensure that the workers, already poor, gain alternative work. This process has been protested and resisted, by owners of rickshaws, by a new union of pullers, and also by independent civil organizations, one of which also put forward the design of a new vehicle, the “city-rickshaw,” to provide employment and to replace services with a design appropriate to cities like Calcutta. This article describes and analyzes this relentless process and argues that rickshaw-pullers and rickshaw pulling, and more generally the social relations of the rickshaw trade, are resonantly symbolic of a much larger world—in history in Asia, and in Calcutta today. The blind “modernization” being forced on the city by the left, which otherwise fits well into conventional categories of “firm government,” contains deep contradictions and raises a range of fundamental questions about governance and democratic practice. Issues far deeper than those that are immediately apparent, suffuse the debate that is taking place, publicly and between the lines.