Page:Sharad Joshi - Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage.pdf/256

 emerging from that fire test, she was still abandoned by Ram. That too when she was pregnant. Joshi never went into the ageold arguments about whether Ram was justified or not; he simply stated that though a queen of Ayodhya, she did not have even a tiny piece of land on this earth in her name. She had to live in the forest once again where she raised her two sons. In very emotional words he used to bring alive the tragedy of Sita’s life. Those were the days when the topic of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was hot. Somehow nobody in that debate had taken any notice of Sita’s plight in Ramayana. Joshi’s speech used to become even more evocative because of that contemporary relevance. The first meeting when Joshi talked of Laxmi Mukti took place on 2 October 1990. This could be taken as a formal beginning of this movement. In the beginning Joshi had thought that at the most he may have to visit about twenty, twenty five such villages. Several knowledgeable persons told him that a farmer was so attached to his land that he would go to any extent to retain his ownership. Majority of the court battles in India are over land disputes within families. No farmer will willingly transfer land to his wife; they argued. But what happened stunned everybody including Joshi. The Laxmi Mukti movement spread like wild fire. Most of the key leaders of the SS set the right example by being amongst the first to add the name of their wives to their land holdings. To fulfill his promise Joshi had to visit more than one and a half thousand villages. In each village the ceremony of handing over the papers took place. While the women were naturally very happy to have some kind of property in their name, perhaps for the first time in their lives, the faces of the men were also overflowing with joy and a sense of gratitude. It was as if they were becoming free after years of being in debt. An interesting incident happened during one of his visits to these villages. It was a village called Raveri in Ralegaon taluka Women Power - New Expression

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