Mumbai’s ban on street sleeping and midnight round-ups

Mumbai’s ban on street sleeping and midnight round-ups made homelessness both an everyday condition and a reason for police intervention. Although the law formally prohibited sleeping in the streets, its enforcement was selective: exemptions, warnings, proof of employment, and the ability to pay could protect some people, while poor, unconnected men faced nightly arrest and confinement. The system’s practical effect was to sort the city’s homeless by their access to status, money, and discretion.

The Prohibition and the Nightly Sweep

Bombay’s midnight curfew emptied streets that during the day were crowded with commerce and movement. Police jeeps gathered in the central streets about half an hour before midnight, and officers began closing restaurants, bars, shops, and pavement stalls. As shutters came down and markets were covered, people without shelter were chased from the footpaths. The city’s nighttime quiet was not simply an interval of rest: it created the conditions for the round-up.

For two to three hours after midnight, plain-clothes squads searched the vacant streets for criminals, people suspected of crimes, drug users, and homeless, unemployed men. More than half the city’s population was homeless, and many people lived and slept outdoors. Individuals, families, and whole communities displaced by drought, flood, or famine settled on pavements and in doorways. The scale of homelessness therefore far exceeded the group most likely to be arrested. The prohibition applied broadly, but the police response depended on whom officers encountered and what that person could establish or afford.

Selective Enforcement

Street sleeping was technically illegal, but officers applied the regulation pragmatically. Religious devotees, including sadhus, were exempt. Elderly people, people with amputations, and the sick or injured were not necessarily arrested, though they could be told to move elsewhere. Lunatics, eccentrics, and itinerant performers were sometimes roughed up but were generally left out of the round-up. Families, especially those with young children, usually received a warning not to remain in one place for more than a few nights.

Other protections depended on a person’s ability to present credentials or negotiate. A man who could show a business card or an employer’s written address to prove that he had work, however menial, was spared. A single man who appeared clean and respectful and could demonstrate some education could often talk his way out of arrest even if he had no job. A person able to pay baksheesh was safe. These distinctions made the night sweep less a uniform response to street sleeping than a discretionary test of employment, respectability, social position, and money.

The people left most exposed were poor, homeless, unemployed, uneducated young men without money to pay or the education and standing to persuade the police. Scores were arrested across the city each night. Some matched descriptions of wanted men; some were found with drugs or stolen goods; others were already known to the police and were routinely arrested on suspicion. Many, however, were taken simply because they were dirty, poor, and visibly helpless. The rule thus reached beyond the pursuit of particular suspects: vulnerability itself could make a person a target.

Arrest and Confinement

The police did not have metal handcuffs for thousands of arrests, and the officers did not carry chains. Instead, they used rough twine made from hemp and coconut fibres to bind the arrested men together by the right hand. Groups of twelve to twenty men could be linked into a single line and marched back to holding cells by a squad of six or eight officers. The procedure turned individual arrests into a collective procession through the city, while the rope substituted for equipment and the men’s weakness for secure restraints.

The round-up’s consequences did not end when the sweep ended. Arrest could mean days, weeks, or even months in prison, in conditions described as exceptionally poor. The prospect of confinement gave a brief nighttime encounter with the police consequences far beyond removal from a pavement. For men without money, stable employment, or the means to contest an arrest, the law’s nominally temporary enforcement could initiate a much longer loss of liberty.

Order, Discretion, and the City

The officers were presented as comparatively restrained and as working with limited resources. They carried bamboo canes rather than firearms or gas, had no walkie-talkies with which to summon backup, and walked their patrol routes because vehicles were unavailable. They did use their canes, but serious beatings were described as uncommon. This account complicates a simple opposition between police violence and police fairness: the squads could be brave and materially under-equipped, while their nightly work still exposed the poorest men to arrest and extended imprisonment.

The round-up depended on unequal room to maneuver. Some people were excluded, some were warned, and some could make themselves legible to the police through employment, education, or payment. Those lacking these protections were gathered and taken away, even when no specific offence beyond poverty and street homelessness was apparent. In this way, the ban reveals a city where formal legality and practical enforcement did not fall evenly across the population. Its nightly order was maintained partly by making the people with the fewest resources bear the greatest risk.