‘Illegal and deeply inhuman’: Mamata Banerjee leads protest against hawker eviction

The Street Theatre India Ignores While the Economy Burns Below

Mamata Banerjee's protest against hawker evictions in Kolkata is not about hawkers—it is about power, and the 35 years I spent in Indian manufacturing taught me to see through exactly this kind of political misdirection.

What Actually Happened

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee led a street protest against the eviction of street vendors from Kolkata's pavements, calling the action "illegal and deeply inhuman." The optics were classic opposition theatre: TMC supremo in the streets, defending the forgotten poor against a system that crushes them.

But here is what the news cycle missed. These evictions are not new. They did not start under BJP rule in Bengal. They started in 2015, when Mamata herself was in power. Street hawkers have been getting shifted, relocated, and evicted for a decade under TMC administration. The difference? Back then, there were no cameras, no opposition narrative to build, no need to reclaim lost political ground. Mamata never led a single protest between 2015 and 2021 when TMC ruled Bengal. Now, post-2024 Lok Sabha performance and heading into 2026 Assembly elections, every street becomes a campaign stage. This is not governance correction. This is opposition politics following a script written by desperation.

What This Means for India

This is not unique to Bengal. This is the pattern across Indian opposition politics right now. When you are out of power, the poor suddenly become visible. When you are in power, they remain invisible. The Congress did it. The DMK did it. Regional parties across India follow the same playbook.

The tragedy is that behind this theatre, 8 lakh street vendor families in Bengal are getting economically crushed. These are not registered businesses. Zero formal recognition. Zero access to bank loans. Zero inventory insurance. When the rupee falls to 94.62 against the dollar, their raw material costs spike 30-40 percent overnight. No subsidy, no government support, no credit line. They absorb the inflation. They reduce inventory. They work longer hours for lower margins. This is structural economic pain, and no street protest changes it because protests do not address currency depreciation, import cost inflation, or credit access.

The Deeper Story Nobody is Telling

Here is what separates real economic analysis from political commentary. The hawker eviction issue in Kolkata is a symptom of a much larger Bengal collapse that started in 2021. The state lost its manufacturing base. Small industries shut down. The informal economy—which absorbs 65 percent of Bengal's workforce—has been contracting for three years. Street vending is a last-resort economy. When formal employment dries up, people move to hawking. When hawker spaces get squeezed, people have nowhere to go. Mamata's protest is fighting the symptom while the disease—industrial dereliction and job losses—remains untouched.

The BJP government in Bengal is not blameless. They have not created the conditions for industrial revival either. But the opposition has no industrial policy to offer. It has only street protests. This is the poverty of Indian political discourse right now. Nobody is building. Everybody is protesting. Nobody is creating formal employment pathways. Everybody is defending the informal economy as if it is a virtue instead of a failure of state capacity to generate decent work.

What Comes Next

Mamata will build a narrative around this protest for the 2026 elections. She will frame it as TMC defending the poor against BJP cruelty. It will resonate emotionally. But electoral cycles do not fix currency crashes or industrial decline. Bengal's informal economy will continue to contract because fundamental economic policy has not changed. Street vendors will still face evictions because politicians prefer theatre to restructuring. And the 8 lakh families will still absorb the inflation, the uncertainty, and the economic squeeze because that is what India's informal economy does—it absorbs shock so that formal India does not have to.

This is BHARAT DECODED. The surface story is opposition politics. The real story is economic collapse dressed in protest slogans.

Follow BHARAT DECODED on Telegram: t.me/DecodedByRDS — Rajnish Sharma (RDS)