It was reportedly carried out by a section of a crowd, allegedly affiliated with a political party, who were shouting political slogans. Although the newly elected government officially condemned the behaviour, appealed for peace, and advised the Kolkata Police to take appropriate action, the events of that night exposed both a long-term economic malady and a deepening religious fissure creeping into our society.

A few brief hours later, Kolkata’s city centre looked almost startlingly unfamiliar, especially to younger citizens under thirty, who had never seen many of these pavements and roads unobstructed. The emptiness itself had become news.

The visuals spread rapidly across television channels and social media. Many celebrated the clear pavements as a long-overdue recovery of public space. Many residents of Kolkata seemed genuinely surprised by the sight of open pavements and visible road edges along Chowringhee and around New Market.

That reaction revealed something larger than a debate about hawkers. It exposed how completely we, the residents of Kolkata, had normalised the gradual surrender of civic space.

For decades, beginning around 1977-78, pavements across much of Kolkata ceased to function primarily as such. In commercial districts such as south Kolkata’s Gariahat, north Kolkata’s Hatibagan, and central Kolkata’s Esplanade, Dharmatala and New Market, they evolved into dense, semi-permanent hawking territories, operating under varying degrees of political protection and selective municipal tolerance. What began as limited survival commerce gradually expanded into a near-total occupation of public space, eroding pedestrian movement, drainage access, and the distinction between public infrastructure and informal retail.

This transformation did not happen overnight, nor was it caused by hawkers alone. It emerged slowly from the convergence of economic decline, demographic pressure, political patronage, and the weakening of the city’s civic administration. Over time, Kolkata’s pavements absorbed pressures that should have been addressed through industrial growth, formal employment, planned retail markets, urban redesign, and long-term economic reform. Instead, the pavements became the city’s substitute labour market.

Once the occupation spread into the symbolic heart of Chowringhee, the encroachment became impossible to ignore. But even then, the deeper issue remained one of administrative and policy failure. If we set aside political theatre for a moment, that becomes difficult to deny.

For the record, even during the British period, anxieties about Kolkata’s disorder persisted. In 1916, S.W. Goode, then Deputy Chairman of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, lamented that the city’s growth remained “disjointed” and “insufficiently planned”. The warning proved prophetic.

The twentieth century brought pressures no government could fully anticipate. The Bengal Famine of 1943 devastated the city socially. The communal violence of 1946 scarred her deeply. Partition irreversibly transformed Kolkata as waves of refugees entered from East Pakistan, followed by further displacement during the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Kolkata accommodated everyone. Meanwhile, her industrial foundations weakened steadily after Independence. Investor confidence deteriorated, labour unrest intensified, and industries stagnated or relocated elsewhere. By the late 1960s, the city’s psychological atmosphere had altered profoundly.

Even the CMDA’s plans of the late 1970s acknowledged severe infrastructural deficits in central Kolkata, warnings that successive governments largely failed to address seriously.

Few cultural works captured that transformation more sharply than Pratidwandi, Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. The film portrayed a city exhausted by unemployment, ideological conflict and urban paralysis. Job queues stretched endlessly. Political unrest hung in the air like a weather system. Life appeared fragile. That Kolkata helps explain today’s pavements.

As formal employment weakened and the organised economy slowed, informal commerce expanded across the city. Hawking had always existed in Kolkata, as in most South Asian cities. But the large-scale political accommodation of pavement occupation accelerated after 1977, particularly in commercial districts such as Gariahat and Hatibagan under the Left Front. This accommodation stemmed partly from political calculation and partly from economic necessity.

Successive governments struggled to generate sufficient formal employment for a city already burdened by the accumulated effects of Partition, industrial decline and demographic pressure. Informality proved a cheaper way to absorb economic distress than structural reform. Pavement commerce generated livelihoods quickly. It also generated political constituencies. Over time, the arrangement hardened into an urban habit.

Formal businesses along Chowringhee and around New Market paid rents, electricity charges, licensing fees and municipal taxes, while large sections of pavement commerce operated beyond equivalent regulatory or fiscal obligations. Enforcement became selective. Encroachment became negotiable. Public space is increasingly governed by informal understandings rather than enforceable civic rules. Nowhere was this more visible than on Chowringhee.

The hawker standing beneath torn plastic sheets beside a temporary stall is not necessarily the architect of this disorder. More often, he is among its casualties: economically precarious, vulnerable to eviction, extortion, weather and periodic police action. The city offered survival, but rarely stability. That uncertainty is fundamentally political and economic.

Public frustration over the unlawful occupation of public space is understandable. But what is increasingly troubling is the perception that such intimidation and bulldozing are acquiring an unmistakable undertone of religious targeting. That possibility, more than the demolition itself, should worry Kolkata. The liberal Kolkata.

This is why the recent bulldozer drives, however emotionally satisfying to some residents or groups, ultimately resolve very little. A city cannot demolish its way out of economic stagnation.

Nor can public space be sustainably reclaimed through spectacles of force while the deeper maladies that produced the informal and gig economy remain intact. If formal employment weakens, small enterprises stagnate, urban planning collapses, and political systems continue to fail to support industrial rejuvenation, the pavement economy will inevitably return. Kolkata’s crisis, therefore, is not merely one of encroachment. It is a crisis of political vision and civic intention.

Ultimately, this remains a socio-economic and political failure. Bulldozers will not solve it. Only political honesty, economic revival and civic courage can. (IPA Service)