Bombay HC’s Cruel Remarks on Beggars Ignore State’s Failure, Reality of Urban Poor – The Wire

On July 3, 2021, the Bombay high court disposed of a PIL (public interest litigation) seeking directions to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to provide food, water and sanitation services for beggars and homeless people in Mumbai. The division bench argued that homeless people “should also work for the country” and that “everything cannot be provided by the state”.

Most notably, the bench called the petition “an invitation to people not to work”.

It is important to put this observation in the context of what has recently transpired in Mumbai concerning its urban poor. On February 9, 2021, Mumbai’s joint commissioner of police issued directions to all police stations to start the ‘zero beggars drive’. The joint commissioner argued that begging is a “social crime” giving a “bad image” to Mumbai. The police rounded up 14 people as beggars and sent them to the Chembur Beggar Home, one of the many detention centres under the infamous Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959. The act serves as a model law for multiple state governments to mark ‘begging’ in public spaces as a punishable offence. The Bombay high court’s logic on begging stems from this punitive structure used time and again to harass the urban poor.

Also read: Decriminalisation of Begging Is a Rare Example of an Activist Court

Punitive approach towards the urban poor

Multiple state governments in India have in place their own set of anti-beggin laws, most of which rely on the Bombay act to define a ‘beggar offender’. Under Section 2 of the act, ‘begging’ covers activities such as “singing, dancing, fortune-telling, performing or offering any article for sale”; exposing “any sore, wound, injury, deformity or disease”; or giving an impression of “having no visible means of subsistence and wandering, about or remaining in any public place…”

Any person who fits this definition of ‘begging’ can be arrested without a warrant by the police and sent for ‘summary inquiry’ in a magistrate court. If found guilty, the person is detained in a ‘Certified Institution’ – also called beggar home – for a period ranging between one year and three years. If convicted for the second time, the detention can be extended to 10 years.

There are two different but related aspects of this definition. First, the law criminalises itinerant communities which have made a living through street performances and selling artisanal products. These communities are part of the nearly 1,500 nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes and 198 denotified tribes that continue to face systemic discrimination since the days of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act.

The second aspect is the criminalisation of poverty itself. The presence of the poor in public spaces does not fit with the idea of a ‘world-class city’. Hence, it is not so much the act of soliciting alms but the mere presence of the urban poor in public spaces that the anti-begging laws target.

This explains the joint commissioner talking about beggars bringing a “bad image” to Mumbai. We saw similar rhetoric ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, when the Delhi police arbitrarily arrested the poor and homeless from the streets on charges of begging. In its bid to ‘beautify’ the city, the Delhi government announced mobile courts for prosecuting ‘beggars’ and declared several areas as ‘zero-tolerance zones’. The then-social welfare minister in Delhi argued:

“Beggars are a nuisance, and begging has to be stopped. When we make Delhi a world-class city, it will be compared with other world capitals. One does not come across beggars in other countries. Why should there be beggars in Delhi?”

Begging as a moral failure

This is the background against which we should read the observations of the Bombay high court, which sees begging not as a result of state failure to provide necessities to all, but as a psychological disposition amongst the urban poor: that they would stop working if they get nutritious cooked meals, access to potable water and sanitary napkins that the petition demanded.

The logic is not new. The idea of the urban poor being a lazy and unproductive class was built into how the colonial administration dealt with the destitute population in India.

Writing on the relationship between Indian colonial law and Victorian England, Preeti Nijhar shows how the Sansis, a nomadic tribe, were blamed for the problems of starvation in many regions of Punjab, whereas the problem was “the vicissitudes of the market economy forced on the indigenous people”.

Similarly, Avishek Ray shows how during the deadly Bengal famine of 1943, by rounding up the starving population as “vagrants” under the 1943 Bengal Vagrancy Act, the colonial government tried to hide its own failures by labelling the victims as ‘overly consumptuous’ and ‘overly fecund’. The colonial state continually reprimanded groups as inferior and criminal, and used them as scapegoats to sidestep the questions on its official policy.

Also read: As Delhi HC Decriminalises Begging, the Centre Must Address the Root Causes

Similarly, the Bombay high court’s observation that “everything cannot be provided by the state” works conveniently for the state to sidestep its responsibilities towards the urban poor. This was highlighted in May 2018 by a bench of the Delhi high court listening to petitions challenging the constitutionality of the anti-begging law in Delhi (which the Delhi administration adopted in 1960 from the Bombay Act). Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar asked the Union government how begging could be an offence in a country where the government did not provide the people with sufficient food or jobs.

The Bombay high court turns this logic on its head when it shifts the blame to the poor rather than the government, assuming that the poor do not work of their own volition. In August 2018, when the Delhi high court struck down Delhi’s anti-begging law as unconstitutional, the judgment revealed that 74% of persons arrested as beggars in Delhi were actually workers in the informal sector – construction, markets, small hotels. 45% were homeless. The petitioners in the case argued that people arrested were “unaware of the reasons of arrest and were taken to the Beggars Court at the pretext of doing some work like cleaning.”

The Bombay high court’s idea that beggars and homeless people “should work for the country” overlooks that ‘beggars’ (as characterised by the urban elite) mostly beg to compensate for seasonal unemployment or casual work that does not pay enough to meet basic needs.

A step backwards

As the ‘zero beggars drive’ in Mumbai continues, nobody will ask: who were the 14 people sent to the Chembur beggar home? It is the same beggars’ home where, in 2011, Bashirabi, a vegetable vendor, was detained after being arrested by policemen at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST railway station). She was put inside with 75 others and was “bathed like animals,” “kept thirsty for hours” and “forced to clean toilets.” Her only crime was to “look” like a beggar.

In 2014, the TISS (Tata Insitute of Social Sciences)-affiliated project Koshish revealed that between 70% and 80% inmates in the Chembur beggars home were not even begging at the time of being arrested. The inmates included a cancer patient, an IT diploma graduate, a retired government servant, and a street hawker.

The Bombay high court’s observations fuel this punitive approach towards the urban poor. This is a step back from the recent Supreme Court directive to the Union and five state governments –Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar – to respond to a plea demanding repeal of such anti-begging laws.

The plea claims that “the presence of beggars is evidence that the state has failed to provide these basic facilities to all its citizens, thus instead of working on its failure and examining what made people beg, criminalising the act of begging is irrational and against the approach of a socialist nation as embedded in the preamble of our Constitution”.

We should hope that the observations of the Bombay high court do not delay the urgent task of reassessing this criminalising legal gaze towards the urban poor in India.

Manas Raturi is a Ph.D. scholar in Sociology at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi.