Haryana woman’s revolution stops public drinking

Till about four years ago, Ram Kali Devi, a 50-something Dalit woman in Kothal Khurd, a remote village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district, 128 km west of Delhi, used to dread the sunset.

Updated on: Jun 3, 2009, 01:11:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Till about four years ago, Ram Kali Devi, a 50-something Dalit woman in Kothal Khurd, a remote village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district, 128 km west of Delhi, used to dread the sunset.

Her husband Dhani Ram, 56, would visit one of the three country liquor vends in and around the village and drink himself silly. Sometimes, he would get together with some associates, and drink outside the local dhaba. Drinking at public places and public scenes of drunken behaviour were an everyday sight in this village.

Dhani Ram would return home, hurl abuses at her and her three children and beat them up. Ram Kali was living through a veritable hell. This routine, with minor variations, had been her lot — every evening — for more than three decades.

Hers wasn’t a unique case. A majority of the women in Kothal Khurd, and several nearby villages, faced the same lot. In fact, this is a problem faced by millions of women in most villages across the country.

Cut to the present. No one drinks in public places in the village any more — thanks to a bunch of gutsy women. In the process, they have also ushered in a modicum of caste and gender equality in a cloistered, hierarchical society dominated
by age-old prejudices.

The architect of the four-year long movement is the 30-something Roshani Devi, a Dalit sarpanch (village head) — and the only Dalit graduate in Kothal Khurd. “I promised, during my campaign for the 2005 panchayat elections, that if I got elected, I’d ban the consumption of liquor in public places,” she said.

She was elected with more votes than her nine other male opponents combined. But it caused a lot of heartburn in the male-dominated village, where women still had to follow the purdah system.

“I still remember my first day as sarpanch. A few upper caste men abused me and wanted to know how a Dalit women could be the sarpanch,” she recalled. The men disrupted the meeting and refused to let her carry out her duties. “They locked me up in a room for four hours,” she added.

“I complained to the local police but the station house officer (SHO) refused to take any action. None of other officials I approached, helped. I then met the Superintendent of Police who directed the SHO to take action,” she said.

Sensing that she meant business, the village elders asked her to take back her complaint. Roshani demanded a quid pro quo — they would have to agree to the closure of all liquor shops in and around the village.

The men, long used to subservient women, had met their match. Hard-nosed, and often tense, negotiations followed over the next few days.

Finally, the men blinked.

Roshani lost no time. She immediately passed a resolution in the panchayat, seeking the closure of all liquor shops within a kilometer of the village. This was then forwarded to the Mahendragarh Deputy Commissioner’s office. Within a month, three shops were closed.

But implementing the ban on the ground was more difficult. Men were still getting their liquor from neighbouring villages and from bootleggers and still returning home drunk.

Village women then formed different groups, patrolled the streets every evening and caught those found drinking. “We used to abuse and even assault these men,” said Ram Kali Devi, a victim of abuse, and a member of the group.

The following day, Roshani Devi and other women would visit the homes of those found drunk and tried to convince them not to drink. Some, like Sardar Singh, 60, a retired armyman, agreed to quit. Others, like Nirdhay Singh, 65, decided to cut down on their daily intake and consume liquor only at home. At the village chaupal (meeting place), many other men took the same pledge.

“The Haryana Excise Act and the Haryana Panchayati Raj Institutions Act empower panchayats to impose fines on those who drink in public,” Yadav told HT.

Taking a leaf out of the book of Kothal Khurd, voluntary women’s groups in 20 other villages in Haryana have also formed committees to prevent men from drinking outside their homes.

These may be the first tiny sparks, but these women are convinced that these sparks will lit a fire that will soon turn into a revolution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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