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Institutionalizing Informality: The hawkers’ question in post-colonial Calcutta*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2015

RITAJYOTI BANDYOPADHYAY
RITAJYOTI BANDYOPADHYAY*
Affiliation:
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India Email: Ritajyoti.csssc@gmail.com
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Abstract

The history of mass political formation in post-colonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilization’ of the ‘poor’. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilization in the terrain of ‘political society’ when some population groups are yet to, or just beginning to, constitute themselves as ‘vote bank’ communities? This article invites us to look into the organizational dimensions of subaltern politics in contemporary urban India. It also prompts us to re-examine the relation between law and subaltern politics. In this light, the article presents some of the major findings of a larger historical anthropology project on the organized mobilization of footpath hawkers in Calcutta since the 1970s. It examines the ways in which the hawkers have acquired and aggregated crucial resources to sustain prolonged anti-eviction movements. In this connection, this article makes a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 675 - 717
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the activists of the Hawker Sangram Committee and the National Hawker Federation for access to their College Street archive; to Jadavpur University-SYLFF Programme; University of California, Berkeley; El Colegio de Mexico; the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; the United States-India Educational Foundation; and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta for employing me and hosting me at various stages of this research. I am thankful to all the participants of a workshop on the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors at the Urban Research and Policy Programme of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore held on 13 August 2012. I presented an earlier draft of this article in a workshop titled ‘Extrapolitics: Indian Democracy and the Political “Outside”’ held between 5 December and 7 December 2012 at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. I am thankful to Nathaniel Roberts for initiating an important discussion following my presentation. Many scholars offered invaluable insight during the writing of this article: Ravi Ahuja, Debarati Bagchi, Kishor Bhat, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Sharit K. Bhowmik, Devika Bordia, Uday Chandra, Partha Chatterjee, Neha Chatterji, Sumandro Chattopadhyay, Priyankar Dey, Anwesha Ghosh, Saktiman Ghosh, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Murad Hussain, Bodhisattva Kar, Koyel Lahiri, Iman Mitra, Janaki Nair, Rajan Pande, T. V. H Prathamesh, Srirupa Roy, S. Soundarya, Aditya Sarkar, Sebastian Schwecke, Samita Sen, Joyashree Roy, Rupsa Roy, Anwesha Sengupta, Jayanta Sengupta, Kaustubh Sengupta, Ritam Sengupta, Sanjay Srivastava, Lakshmi Subramanian, Carol Upadhya, Lalit Vachani, Rupa Viswanath, and my students at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. I am grateful to all of them. Surit Das has provided several helpful suggestions while copy-editing the manuscript. I am thankful to the three anonymous reviewers from Modern Asian Studies for their thoughtful suggestions on two earlier drafts of the article.

References

1 In the colonial archive of Calcutta, the term ‘hawker’ appears along with other similar terms such as pavement seller, footpath seller, and pheriwala (peddler, or costermonger; whether stationary or mobile) at least since the late nineteenth century. But even in the 1970s, ‘hawker’, or even pheriwala (pheriwali for female vendor), was not a common term for a trader, whether on the footpath or itinerant; rather, they were popularly known for their trade. Thus, a fruit seller was called a phalwala (phal means fruit); one who sold utensils was called a basanwala (basan means utensils); and a fish seller a maachhwala (maachh means fish). In Calcutta's everyday language of conversation, ‘hawker’ emerged only after partition (1947), when the government of West Bengal initiated economic rehabilitation projects for refugees by building a number of ‘refugee hawker corners’ in the city. These retail corners, which fuelled much of the expansion in the retail trade in refugee-dominated areas, were regulated through the Markets Regulation Act, and shop owners were given a trade licence, but retained their specific history in their names (for example, Kalighat Refugee Hawkers Corner).

2 In Calcutta, two such concepts are popularly associated with street vending: ‘low-circuit economy’ and ‘bottom billion entrepreneurialism’ (both are normally circulated in English). Interestingly, if the genealogy of the former can be traced to the ‘dualistic’ phase of the intellectual history of the informal economy in the early 1970s (broadly meaning labour-intensive, family-based, resource- and capital-anaemic, and non-contractual relations of production in the petty commodity sector structurally connected to the capital-intensive ‘upper circuit’ by providing ‘wage subsidy’ to the rest of the economy), the latter is a relatively recent conceptualization of the poor of the developing world participating vigorously in the global economy without formal recognition from the state. If the former concept comes from the work of T. G. McGee, the latter is the effect of the global policy gurus of the late 1990s and the early 2000s. For a discussion of the features of the lower circuit, see McGee, T. G. (1974). In praise of tradition: towards a geography of anti-development, Antipode, 6:3, pp. 30–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a review of the globally circulating literature on bottom billion entrepreneurialism, see Roy, A. (2009). Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, Routledge, New York and LondonGoogle Scholar.

3 By this term, I mean the critical interface of the state and the ‘movement’ of the hawkers where one defines the other in governing spaces and populations. See Bandyopadhyay, R. (2011). Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta, Dialectical Anthropology, 35:3, pp. 295–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 ‘Narendra Modi kicks off BJP's Chai Pe Charcha campaign; says tea stalls are like footpath parliament’, The Economic Times, 12 February 2014, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-02-12/news/47270106_1_chai-pe-charcha-campaign-narendra-modi-tea-stall, [accessed 20 June 2015].

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 This surge for the nationalization of the figure of the hawker follows a certain internationalization of the category—since the early 1970s, at the behest of the International Labour Organization, with the popularization of the term ‘informal sector’. The negative opposite of the unionized formal sector, the informal sector, is immensely heterogeneous. Numerous studies that document structures of employment and labour conditions in the cities of the ‘developing world’ generally use the category of informal economy as the starting point and find smooth and automatic translation of the act of street hawking as one of many instances of informality. The concept, with all its incoherence and ambiguity, has become doxic common sense. Questions regarding the urban condition in the ‘South’ are framed around the concept of the informal economy and around a conceptual paradigm that translates and orders data into information on poverty, unemployment, and entrepreneurship. Some influential terms in this literature, such as ‘low-circuit economy’ and ‘service sector’, seeped into the language of popular activism by the late 1990s and became registers along which the archive was shaped. Gradually, like the media, academe became part of the organized mobilization in the informal economy.

8 Annual Report of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India, 2006–7, http://mhupa.gov.in/pdf/annual-reports/ar0607eng.pdf, [accessed 20 June 2015].

9 A national-level consolidation of street vendors, unions, cooperatives, associations, and community-based organizations, NGOs, and individuals like academics, doctors, and lawyers who have the record of working with street vendors. Their membership policy can be found at: http://nasvinet.org/newsite/nasvi-membership-policy-2/, [accessed 20 June 2015].

10 A national federation of more than 1,000 street vendors’ unions/associations with its seed in the Calcutta-based Hawker Sangram Committee. The National Hawker Federation is connected to the National Alliance of People's Movements.

11 This is not to deny the existence of zoning norms in many cities during colonial and post-colonial times. In 1935, for instance, the Bombay Municipal Corporation imposed prohibition on ‘hawker nuisance’ in certain important streets. For details, see an elaborate report by Times of India: ‘Hawker nuisance in Bombay: new municipal rules’, Times of India, 5 January 1935. Having said this, I should mention that such norms were often city-specific and there was hardly any correspondence among cities.

12 The Women Hawkers Adhikar Sangram Committee was founded in Calcutta in 2012.

13 See ‘Sodan Singh Etc. vs New Delhi Municipal Committee & . . . on 30 August, 1989’ (AIR 1988, 1989 SCR (3)1038).

14 See Chatterjee, P. (2004). The Politics of the Governed: Reflexions of Popular Politics in Most of the World, Permanent Black, RanikhetGoogle Scholar.

15 In the early writings of subaltern studies scholars, a distinction was made in explaining the dynamics of the Indian nationalist struggle under Gandhi between the ‘organised mobilisation’ from above and the ‘spontaneous mobilisation’ of the subaltern peasants from below. See Chatterjee, Partha (1984). Bengal 1920–1947: The Land Question, K. P. Bagchi and Co., CalcuttaGoogle Scholar. I maintain that this separation is impossible in cases where the government becomes ubiquitous in the everyday life of the subalterns. The hawkers’ question is one such example.

16 A footpath (or pavement, or sidewalk) separates vehicular traffic from pedestrian traffic, and streets from public buildings. In Calcutta, hawkers largely define themselves as ‘footpath hawkers’ to point out the fact that they do not impede vehicular traffic. The organized mobilization that I am going to narrate in this article has always maintained the edge of the footpath as the spatial limit of the hawkers’ enterprise. The space of the footpath is thus crucial to understand the politics of hawking.

17 Let me mention just three relatively more cited examples. One is on molecular changes in the public infrastructure induced by ‘silent encroachment’ of the disenfranchised ‘urban informals’ in Iran. See Bayat, A. (1997). Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran, Columbia University Press, New YorkGoogle Scholar. Another is on the ‘politics of patience’ by pavement dwellers, organized by an activist NGO, leading to the ‘deepening of democracy’ in millennial Mumbai. See Appadurai, A. (2001). Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics, Environment and Urbanisation, 13:2, pp. 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The third is popular politics in Calcutta. See Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

18 See Anjaria, J. S. (2010). ‘The Politics of Illegality: Mumbai Hawkers, Public Space and the Everyday Life of the Law’ in Bhowmik, Sharit K. (ed.), Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy, Routledge, New Delhi, pp. 69–86Google Scholar.

19 In June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a National Emergency that lasted 21 months. The Emergency invested the prime minister with extraordinary power to indefinitely detain democratic procedures and issues of civil and human rights. It was also the era when the Indian state intensified its biopolitical control over households in slums and squatter colonies through a series of policies, including forced birth control, by linking it with the question of resettlement. See Tarlo, Emma (2003). Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, Permanent Black, New DelhiGoogle Scholar. By ‘post-Emergency era’, I refer to the overthrow of the Congress regime (for the first time since independence in 1947) by the Indian electorate in the 1977 general elections and its impact on mass politics in India.

20 See Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p. 139.

21 Ibid., p. 61.

22 Roy, A. (2004). ‘The Gentleman's City: Urban Informality in the Calcutta of New Communism’ in Al Sayyad, Nizar and Roy, A. (eds), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from Middle East, Latin America and South Asia, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, p. 147Google Scholar.

23 Aniruddha Dutta has analysed such news contents with consummate skill. See A. Dutta (2007), Space, sanitization and press: The coverage of street vending in Calcutta, http://development-dialogues.blogspot.in/2007/05/development-displacement-and-hawkers.html, [accessed 20 June 2015].

24 I have interviewed 225 footpath hawkers distributed (unevenly) in ten important intersections of Calcutta. I found that 203 hawkers out of the total I interviewed commuted from various towns and villages within a radius of 100 kilometres from two important train stations—Sealdah and Howrah—in Calcutta. Those who lived in the city corporation area travelled around 30 minutes to an hour from their respective neighbourhoods. All the chosen intersections were within the radius of 12 kilometres from the two rail stations.

25 The Special Branch—the intelligence wing of the city police—tracks public political rallies in the city and compiles them in files known as the Daily Notes. Later, the documents are copied and filed under the headings of ‘Left activities’, ‘Muslim and Minority Affairs’, ‘Labour Issues’, and so on. They are separately archived as politically sensitive documents, to which public access is severely restricted if pertaining to the post-colonial period. These are the state's own private autobiographies, surviving through the logic of internal duplication. The Daily Notes files, on the other hand, are accumulated as unclassified mother copies on a yearly basis and are preserved as huge cyclostyled exercise books. These can be accessed if you know how to operate in the lower bureaucracy. The police stations under the Kolkata Police have a Special Branch wing represented by a two-member team. The Special Branch team has informants within the political organizations who supply information about the forthcoming rallies. The Special Branch team accordingly attend the rally and note down its movement, measure the number of people attending, record the speeches of the leaders in short hand, describe the movement of the rallies, and so on. The police-station-level Special Branch teams write reports in Bengali, English, and Hindi. Then, the reports come to the officer-in-charge of the Daily Notes section of the Special Branch, along with documents such as pamphlets circulated in rallies, pictures of meetings, and details of posters. Particularly, the Special Branch teams at police stations are asked to assess whether the street-level political activities are ‘anti-government’ in nature. The officer-in-charge, Daily Notes, then summarizes the information in English and maintains an everyday file of the city streets. Usually, the final entry is made in the file one or two days after the occurrence of the event. The file then goes to the deputy commissioner of police, Special Branch (I) for classification. Such classifications also involve the deputy commissioner's personal assessment and judgement of the event.

26 In his 1974 social survey on the Muslims of Calcutta, M. K. A. Siddiqui found that the wholesale fruit traders of Mecchua Bazaar came predominantly from the Peshawari groups such as Awan, Kakazari, Kalal, and Kashmiri Peshawari. He also found the relatively recent entry of Raie traders from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the sector. Siddiqui made a passing reference to the Raie group associations as transitioning from a hereditary leadership to an electoral system. It is not clear how the Bengal Hawker Association organized the Raie hawkers who were already connected ethnically and financially to the wholesalers through various traditional group associations. See Siddiqui, M. K. A. (1974). Muslims of Calcutta: A Study in Aspects of Their Social Organisation, Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, pp. 51 and 112Google Scholar.

27 President's rule or central rule in India refers to a constitutional situation when a state legislature is dissolved or suspended and the state come directly under the federal rule. Article 356 of the Constitution of India enables the central government to impose president's rule if the state government fails to rule the state according to the Constitution.

28 See Shivdas Banerjee (1977). ‘Party infighting may hit Congress in Bengal’, The Times of India, 1 March.

29 Times of India, 21 August 1960; Jugantar, 21 August 1960.

30 This was the headline of a long report in The Guardian, 6 February 1978.

31 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 630/71–72, Serial A-4, ORS 4513–518. The Statesman, 29 November, 1969.

32 For a description of the wards, see http://www.calcuttayellowpages.com/mwards.html, [accessed 20 June 2015].

33 Katra means market.

34 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 630/71–72, Serial A-4, ORS 4513–518.

35 INTUC is the abbreviated form of Indian National Trade Union Congress.

36 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75.

37 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75, 253, ORS 3988–90.

38 National Federation of Independent Trade Unions was a breakaway group of Congress trade unionists established by Naren Sen in 1967. Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75, 18, ORS 4398.

39 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75, 55, ORS 4679–80.

40 In a pamphlet issued by the Muslim League titled Chawringhee Elakar Hawker Uchchheder Poriprikshete Janasadharaner Nikat Muslim League Er Abedan (The submission of the Muslim League to the general public in the context of Hawker eviction in Chawringhee), it was claimed (according to a translation by the police) that the majority of evicted hawkers belonged to the Muslim and Scheduled Caste communities, among whom the problem of unemployment had been more acute. SW 636/75, 82, ORS 4679–80 and SW 636/75, ORS 4679–80, 5 April 1975, 33.

41 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Daily Notes of Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75, 82, ORS 4679–80.

42 Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal, Secret Report of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. OR 4982, Communal Groups: Muslim Affairs, 160 Muslim League, 114.

43 See Chatterjee, Partha (2011). Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, Permanent Black, RanikhetGoogle Scholar.

44 Communications with Saktiman Ghosh (on 7 December 2007) and Ashoke Ghosh (on 21 March 2009).

45 See Prasanta Sur (1978). ‘Foreword’ in Shivaprasad Samaddar, Calcutta Is, CMC Publications, Calcutta,

46 The Statesman, 8 July 1983.

47 West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings, 1986 (no publisher), p. 50.

48 Ibid., Annexure 4.

49 See Supreme Court and High Court rulings such as, Supreme Court of India, ‘Olga Tellis & Ors vs Bombay Municipal Corporation & . . . on 10 July, 1985’ (1986 AIR 180, 1985 SCR Supl. (2) 51); ‘Sodan Singh Etc. Etc vs New Delhi Municipal Committee & . . . on 30 August, 1989’ (1989 AIR 1988, 1989 SCR (3)1038); Calcutta High Court, ‘South Calcutta Hawkers . . . vs Government Of West Bengal And . . . on 20 December, 1996’, (AIR 1997 Cal 234, (1997) 1 CALLT 453 HC); Supreme Court of India, ‘Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers Union & . . . vs Municipal Corporation, Greater . . . on 9 September, 2013’, http://indiankanoon.org/doc/21657117/, [accessed 3 June 2015].

50 West Bengal Industrial Policy 1994, http://dcmsme.gov.in/policies/state/westbengal/ipwb.htm, [accessed 20 June 2015].

51 The Times of India, 10 October 1994.

52 The Times of India, 26 July 1995.

53 See Roy, A. (2003). City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and Politics of Poverty, University of Minnesota Press, MinneapolisGoogle Scholar.

54 Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta.

55 See articles and poems compiled in Lahiri, Soumitra (ed.) (1997). Operation Sunshine, Biswakosh Parishad, CalcuttaGoogle Scholar. Also see Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta (especially Chapter 4: ‘Dreaming of Tombstones’, pp. 133–89).

56 A recent visit to the rehabilitation centres revealed that the Galiff Street Market has been turned into a labour quarter; the rehabilitated hawkers have already sold their plots at the Ultadanga Market; the market close to the Bijan Setu has been converted into an e-Seva Kendra for the Municipal Corporation; and the site near Gol Park has been transferred to the city police.

57 It is worth mentioning here that Subhas Chakravarty was the leader of the North 24 Parganas District Committee, and Kanti Ganguly, who at that time was a member of the mayor's council, represented the South 24 Parganas District Committee.

58 Samaddar, Calcutta Is, p. 48.

59 Dasgupta, N. (1992), Petty Trading in the Third World: The Case of Calcutta, Avebury, AldershotGoogle Scholar.

60 Anandabazar Patrika, 24 March 1975.

61 Anandabazar Patrika, 21 April 1972.

62 Anandabazar Patrika, 27 April 1975.

63 Newsweek, 7 May 1997.

64 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed.

65 K. Lahiri (2013). ‘Aachhi aar thhakbo’: Towards a Reading of the Politics of the Hawker Sangram Committee, unpublished M. Phil dissertation, Jadavpur University.

66 See Bandyopadhyay, Politics of archiving.

67 See ibid., pp. 295–316.

68 This is where the hawkers’ question becomes an instance of ‘political society’—a space of negotiation between the state and the civil society peopled by population groups who exist by collectively sidestepping the bourgeois law of property. See Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

69 Foucault, M. (1989). Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge, London and New YorkGoogle Scholar.

70 Derrida, J. (1996). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Prenowitz, Eric (trans.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 2Google Scholar.

71 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p. 131.

72 Ibid.

73 Chatterjee, P. (2009). The coming crisis in West Bengal, Economic and Political Weekly, 44:9, pp. 42–5Google Scholar. The specific quotation can be found on p. 43. In this case, my argument is similar to that of Kenneth Bo Nielsen. See Nielsen, K. B. (2009). Farmers’ use of the courts in an anti-land acquisition movement in India's West Bengal, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 59, pp. 121–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 See, for instance, the anthropological work of Bernard Cohn and M. N. Srinivas in 1950s and 1960s, the historical work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective in the 1980s, and modernist novels such as Satinath Bhaduri's Dhoraicharitmanas as an illustration of this point. See Cohn, B. (1965). Anthropological notes on disputes and law in India, American Anthropologist, new series 67:6 (part 2), pp. 82–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Srinivas, M. N. (1959). The dominant caste in Rampura, American Anthropologist, new series 61:1, pp. 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guha, R. (1999). Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Duke University Press, Durham and LondonGoogle Scholar. Bhaduri, Satinath (1973 [1951]). Dhorai Charitmanas in Satinath Granthabali, vol. 2, Ghosh, Sankha and Acharya, Nirmalya (eds), Signet, Calcutta, pp. 1–296Google Scholar.

75 For a general discussion of the meaning of ‘judicialization’, see Domingo, Pilar (2004). Judicialization of politics or politicization of the judiciary? Recent trends in Latin America, Democratization, 11:1, pp. 104–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (2007). Law and disorder in the postcolony, Social Anthropology, 15:2, pp. 133–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Randeria, Shalini (2007). De-politicization of democracy and judicialization of politics, Theory, Culture and Society, 24:4, pp. 38–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of judicialization of politics in contemporary West Bengal, see Nielsen, Farmers’ use of the courts, pp. 121–44.

76 This is where the Hawker Sangram Committee's mode of operation is markedly different from its predecessors in 1970s.

77 Saktiman Ghosh, Speech delivered on 4 July 2006 in front of Metro Rail Bhawan, Kolkata.

78 Sanyal, K. (2007). Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Postcolonial Capitalism, Routledge, New DelhiGoogle Scholar.

79 Bandyopadhyay, R. (2012). ‘In the Shadow of the Mall: Street Hawking in Global Calcutta’ in Mathews, G., Ribeiro, G. Lins, and Vega, C. Alba (eds), Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 171–85Google Scholar.

80 A. Kundu and P. C. Mohanan (2009). ‘Employment and Inequality Outcomes in India’, Paper presented for the OECD Seminar on Employment and Inequality Outcomes: New Evidence, Links and Policy Responses in Brazil, China and India, April 2009, OECD, Paris.

81 C. Bonner and D. Spooner (2010). ‘Organising Labour in the Informal Economy—Forms of Organisation and Relationships’, WIEGO, paper presented to XVII World Congress of Sociology (Research Committee 44: Labor Movements), July 2010, Gothenburg: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/ipg/2011-2/08_a_bonner.pdf, [accessed 20 June 2015].

82 R. Agarwala (2011). India's Informal Workers and Social Protection, India in Transition, http://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/agarwala, [accessed 20 June 2015].

83 Michels, R. (1915). Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, translated into English from the 1911 German edition by Paul, Eden and Paul, Cedar, The Free Press, New YorkGoogle Scholar.

84 Pamphlet published in Hindi and circulated by the Communist Party of India for its candidate at the Badkhal 87 Vidhan Sabha Constituency, ‘Make Comrade Jagram Gautam (Chacha) victorious by full voting’.

85 Pamphlet published in Hindi by the Communist Party of India and circulated by the Haryana Hawkers’ Union for the Badkhal 87 Vidhan Sabha Constituency Candidate Comrade Jagram Gautam (Chacha).