Protesting Publics in Indian Cities

The bazaar or intermediate classes have remained outside the predominant research imagination on urban change. Delhi's wholesale and retail traders, the primary subjects of this paper, are a subset of this bazaar world. This paper uses a case study of the Supreme ourtordered sealing drives of 2006-07 to investigate how these traders were threatened by eviction dynamics earlier experienced by slum-dwellers and small-scale industrialists. Trader groups, thus, must be included within narratives of displacement despite being deeply enmeshed in the growth of the "world-class" city and lifestyles. This paper examines how a dispersed trader presence located across the city became a citywide protesting public and the multiple political strategies it used in coalescing public opposition.