‘This would work out to be minimum Rs. 10,000 a year. Remember, you are not counting the work she did even on holidays and Sundays. If you have been married for say twenty years, the value of her work would be two lakhs. If you took that amount as a loan from a bank just calculate how much it would be inclusive of interest. The dues would easily exceed Rupees eight lakhs. Bank would forcibly extract this money from you. Put you in jail if you fail to repay it. But what about the money you owe to your own wife, the Laxmi of your home? ‘Now consider what you have been paying her in return. Just plain rotis to eat and tattered clothes to wear! When are you going to pay her at least a token of your gratitude? You offer something to God when you go to the temple to thank him for something good he did to you. In the same spirit you should transfer a portion of your land to her.’ In meeting after meeting Joshi repeated this. Thousands of farmers present would be in tears. Some would even cry uncontrollably. On reaching home many would initiate the legal process of transferring a part of their land in their wife’s name. Joshi also used to add that if there were hundred farmers in a village who had added their wives’ names to property papers, he would personally visit that village. If the village did not have hundred households, then even if eighty percent of the farmers gave that ownership to their wife, he would visit. A special meeting would be organized and in that meeting in front of all the villagers the farmers would come to the front one by one and ceremoniously hand over the land ownership papers to their wives. Joshi used to connect the Laxmi Mukti movement with a story of Goddess Sita from Ramayana. Even after spending fourteen years in the forest with her husband Ram, after returning to Ayodhya, Sita could not live in peace. She had to prove her purity by undergoing a fire test. Tragically, even after 234
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
