Islamophobia and communal invective, couched in phrases such as “Muslim encroachers’ mafia” and insinuations of “occupying public spaces”, were stridently articulated by the head of Chandni Chowk Nagrik Manch, who concurrently functions as a spokesperson for the Delhi unit of the BJP, while castigating the police for authorising a street vendors’ procession through the precincts of Old Delhi’s Walled City.
The controversy unfolded on Tuesday when the traders’ body criticised the police for permitting a procession that moved from Town Hall to the Red Fort, traversing the arterial stretches of Chandni Chowk and passing in proximity to the historic Jama Masjid.
In a statement issued to the press, Chandni Chowk Nagrik Manch general secretary Praveen Shankar Kapoor alleged that nearly 300 individuals had participated in the march, which he characterised not as a lawful democratic assembly but as an orchestrated assertion of territorial entitlement by what he termed “encroachers”; in doing so, he employed communally inflected language, according to The Indian Express.
The rally, however, had been convened by various associations of street vendors operating in Chandni Chowk on February 25, and its stated objective was the implementation of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, a central legislation intended to safeguard the rights of hawkers while subjecting vending activities to a structured regulatory framework; the protesters contended that the non-enforcement of the statute had rendered them vulnerable to exploitation, arbitrary displacement and cyclical eviction drives.
Kapoor, in rebuttal, circulated a video clip of the procession in which participants were heard chanting the slogan, “Jo zameen sarkari hai, woh zameen hamari hai” — translated as “Government land is our land” — and he interpreted the slogan as an audacious claim over public property, asserting that it amounted to an open declaration of intent to appropriate state land under the guise of livelihood rights.
The traders’ organisation further maintained that merchants and residents of the Walled City had repeatedly petitioned authorities for the removal of what they described as illegal encroachments, arguing that unregulated vending had impaired commercial order, pedestrian mobility and civic hygiene.
Tt added that the area’s Member of Parliament and local municipal representatives had consistently raised these grievances before the Delhi government, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the police.
Invoking recent observations of the Delhi High Court, which had reportedly expressed concern over the proliferation of encroachments in the vicinity of Jama Masjid and Chandni Chowk, the traders’ body signalled its intention to escalate the matter to the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Minister.