for the government to enact any legislation; SS should encourage farmers to transfer farm produce in her name to give her financial stability. She believed that the law in itself would not be enough and Joshi agreed with her. For almost three years, Kishwar travelled with Joshi and spoke at several meetings. She also wrote in detail about Laxmi Mukti in Manushi. According to Kishwar, the reasons for unprecedented response Joshi got were: the respect farmers had for him, their belief in his spotless character and their faith that this man would not deceive them. Joshi acknowledged freely the contribution Kishwar made to this movement. He said, ‘In many meetings she would get overwhelmed with emotions and would start crying. She said she had never believed that a man can express the viewpoint of a woman so convincingly.’ When this writer met Madhu Kishwar at her home in Delhi on 18 March 2016, she talked very fondly of those days and the memories were still vivid in her mind even after twenty five years. It is rather unfortunate that the grand success achieved by the Laxmi Mukti movement was largely ignored by other women’s organizations or even journalists and academicians. Gail Omvedt, an American by birth, and sociologist by education, who worked with her husband Bharat Patankar in the field of rural development for several years, was a notable exception. In February 1992, she and Chetana Gala, an entrepreneur and a longtime colleague of Joshi from Mhaswad, visited villages of Metikheda and Raveri to study firsthand the impact of the Laxmi Mukti. She recorded her observations in two articles in Shetkari Sanghatak (21 June and 6 July 1992). “Had anyone predicted couple of years ago that thousands and lakhs of farmers would come forward to transfer part of their land to their wives, nobody would have believed him; but today it had actually happened,” she wrote. The year in which this happened was a very special year. It happened to be the hundredth anniversary of 238
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
