As increasing trends point to businesses and political parties targeting persons rather than masses, forms of patriarchal authority are softened and diffused, leading to a revision of the older distinctions that prevailed between public and private. At the same time, as relations between individuals are mediated more through markets and media, they also generate new kinds of rights and new capacities for imagination along with new ideas of belonging or inclusion that in turn, lead to novel ways of exercising citizenship rights and conceiving politics. This experience of inclusion in new circuits of communication and of sharing intellectual property across classes, such as seen with television, can help to politicise those sections previously marginalised. This paper, examines the implications of this argument in terms of recent debates over the rights of the hawker, or the 'pheriwala', in Mumbai.
