HYDERABAD INDIA: The odds seemed Overwhelming from the start: poor illiterate Village women taking on one of India’s most powerful political lobbies and generations of rigid social codes.
But in a campaign hailed by many as Indias first major grass-roots women’s movement some of this country’s more destitute women have forced a large Indian state to ban the sale of cheap government-produced liquor Women in hundreds of rural villages campaigned for 18 months to force the southern state of Andhra Pradesh to ban the liquor this fall. To do so they battled the government liquor industry—and in many case their own husbands. The women protested. that the cheap liquor helped prompt men to squander their meager salaries on booze and beat their wives and children The anti-liquor movement has spread through a third of Indias states and even more significantly has emboldened tens of thousands of the country’s more vulnerable women to Launch a cultural revolution in the toughest bastion of all—their own homes standing up to domineering abusive husbands.
It is a victory with a very visible result: improvements in the lives of these rural women said Ranjana Kumari general secretary of the All India Woman’s Vigilance Committee one of the women’s-rights groups that helped spur the movement. It has given confidence and strength to women who never before had it.
Sociologists have labeled the protest movement a major breakthrough for women’s empowerment in a nation where women—particularly poor rural women—are among the more repressed in the world.
This is the first time there has been a movement led by rural women said As his Nandy of New Delhi’s Center for the Study of Developing Societies Previously women’s movements have been led mostly by women from the cities or the working class.
Success has not come easily. One women’s leader allegedly was raped by thugs hired by local liquor contractors Thousands of women have been clubbed by police attempting to quash demonstrations and the government has debated censoring the reading list of the literacy program credited with starting the anti-liquor agitation.
There has been more sobering fallout. In Andhra Pradesh more than SO men have died from drinking chemicals containing poisonous forms of alcohol in the two months since the State banned the sale of arrack a liquor distilled from sugarcane that is commonly drank in rural villages and urban slums
The cheap alcohol was an issue over which thousands of women who had never entered public life before were willing to join protest movements wrote Bharat Dogra a columnist for the daily Hindustan Times. They were willing to face police lathis (bamboo canes) as well as the various threats of the liquor contractors
The protest began in a handful of villages where women in a government literacy program read a fictitious story about young heroine who mobilized women in her village to close the local liquor shop where husbands passed their evenings spending their money on liquor rather than or food for their families.
Many of the women recognized themselves in the story and for the first time began discussing the domestic violence that came with their husbands drunkenness. Informal surveys indicate that as many as 90 per Cent of the men in some rural villages have serious alcohol problems and routinely beat their wives and children
The village women began attacking liquor shops pouring their booze into the streets and shaving the heads of men found drink there In some village’s women hung skirts outside Liquor shops that refused to close. Groups of women seized drunken patrons wrapped the skins around them and paraded them through village’s on donkeys in an effort to humiliate them
Ina nation beset with the conflicts of Caste and religion the movement also produced an unexpected bonding among previously combative groups. United by a common cause high caste and lower-caste village women who previously never would have shared a meal overcame traditional prejudice to work side by side In many areas Hindus and Muslims jointly shut down liquor shops.
The government was a main target of the campaign. For several years it has produced arrack 0 raise state funds and has been responsible for a spread in the liquors consumption.
The clear alcohol usually flavored with red chili pepper. was sold in small plastic packets for the equivalent of about 6 cents to 8 cents each making it an affordable liquor for landless agricultural workers who earn about 40 cents a day.
In October Andhira Pradesh not only banned the government-produced arrack but also barred the sale of any liquor on the first of the month and Tuesdays the traditional paydays for agricultural laborers. Districts in several other states have curtailed the sale of arrack and the protest rallies ate continuing in about eight states.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 14, 1994
