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YOGESH VAJPEYI
MAHIDPUR (UJJAIN), APRIL 7: An anti-liquor movement led by women is brewing in rural Madhya Pradesh. And the State Government does not know how to tackle it.
Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, in his new excise policy in 1996, had said that if 50 per cent of women in a village want, they can enforce closure of liquor shops. Women of Mahidpur in Ujjain have done just that - now it's the Government's turn to respond. The deadline is April 30.
Will the Government keep its word? Says the leader of the militant women activists and local MLA, Kalpana Parulekar: "I don't care." As she discusses war strategy with her troop commanders in the Mahidpur headquarters of her Disha Kisan Sangathan, she adds: "Women's policy or no policy, we will not let any liquor shop in the Mahidpur area function."
April 30 is the deadline set up by the group for the closure of liquor shops in Mahidpur, Sherpur, Kheda Khajooria, Bari Delchi, Ghosla, Jagoti, Jharda, Lalgarh, Jhoothawad, Baijnath, Bapaiyya and Indokh villages which wereauctioned by the Government this March despite written objections by more than 90 per cent women voters of the area.
Parulekar had put the Government in the dock during the first session of the new State Assembly. And when MP Excise Minister tried to pull a fast one by claiming that some of the signatures were forged, the Congress legislator blew up. "Your officials have money to waste on hand-writing experts, but they can't spent Rs 2 to make a phone call to an MLA to seek evidence in support of her representation!" she thundered.
The Minister finally conceded that the shops would be closed by April 30 if a high-power team of officials finds there is truth in her allegations.The tension in Mahidpur town and adjoining villages is palpable. "Armed goons of the liquor mafia are trying to terrorise the local people. But we are determined to fight to the finish," Parulekar's chief of staff, Sohani Bai of Paldya village exudes confidence. The steel in the voice of this frail, uneducated girl, has been temperedby many pitched battles she has fought against the liquor mafia.
And the Government will be forced to listen to the women. They have not only got two authorised liquor shops in the area closed down through direct action but continue to raid illegal liquor outlets set up by the mafia in interior villages.
How did they do it? "Whenever we hear of an illegal liquor outlet in any village, we raid it and loot the stuff," says Sohan Bai, who had returned from a raid in Dhulate, where she seized 200 bottles of illegally stocked liquor. This followed similar raids and consequent seizure in Dhablasia, Paldya, Gogakhera and Ranyara Peer in March this year.
"We are not breaking any law, we are only enforcing a law which the Government machinery does not enforce," Parulekar, the lawyer, argues. But she is not bothered about the legality of her actions - a fact proved by over half a dozen criminal cases of loot and rioting registered against Kalpana, Sohan Bai and others.
"It all started in June 1997 from villageRasooldia," Kalpana recalls. A lawyer and trade unionist who worked with social activists like Anna Hazare and Medha Patekar, she was on a padyatra to 207 villages in Mahidpur block when she was mobbed by womenfolk of the village. "We don't want anything from you and your government. Take back your schools, your tubewells... everything you have given us. But take back your kalari also," they beseeched.
"Even ten-year-old kids had become liquor addicts. The elders we addressed as kaka and tau respectfully indulged in bloody brawls and strip-tease when they returned home drunk," Champa Bai of Rasooldia, who now heads the local unit of Disha Kisan Sangathan, recalls. The villagers were heavily indebted. Money-lenders charged interest of 15 per cent per month forcing them to mortgage their land.
Stunned by what she saw, Parulekar went back to Mahidpur, gathered her band of storm-troopers, marched to Rasooldia and locked up the liquor shop. When the contractor tried to reopen the shop, the women's brigadestaged a dharna outside it. The next morning, the entire village came out in support of the agitators. The shop was dismantled and 400 bags of liquor bottles seized from the premises were dumped at the centre of the village.
The contractor summoned the police, but the women wouldn't budge. He then tried to terrorise them through armed goons imported from Ujjain and Indore. But the women fought them off - two of them were injured seriously. And thus the liquor wend in Rasooldia was closed forever. After a month, a liquor shop in Mansoor Goradia village met the same fate.
Parulekar says her group gave up the path of direct action only after it was assured under the new excise policy any shop could be got closed down peacefully if half the women of an area made a written representation. "If we find that the new policy is nothing but a joke, we will again resort to direct action. And the responsibility for what happens will lie on Digvijay Government's shoulders," she says.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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