In the early hours of November 24, 1996, bulldozers — overseen by officers of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, cadres of the ruling CPI(M), and police — moved through Calcutta’s arterial streets from the north to the south, reducing to rubble thousands of makeshift stalls. A day before, Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty had met with hawker-union leaders and assured them that any eviction would necessarily include peaceful rehabilitation. The promise proved hollow.  Operation Sunshine, the brainchild of Chakraborty and senior Left leader Kanti Ganguly, was set into motion. Defending the eviction drive, Chakraborty argued that reclaiming public spaces from encroachment was essential to make the city more orderly and attractive to investors and tourists in a new era of economic liberalisation. Three decades later, as a new BJP government in the state undertakes hawker eviction drives, this time with no mention of rehabilitation, the echoes of 1996 are difficult to ignore. Framed as a reclamation of public space to bring about civic order, then — as now — the question remains how a city built on …