By IANS
Nagpur : Doughty women in a municipal ward here braved physical attacks, intimidation and intrigue Sunday to participate in a novel ballot against a liquor shop that has become an irritant for them.
The first of its kind all-women poll was ordered by district collector Sanjay Mukherjee to decide the fate of the liquor shop in the city’s Rameshwari ward in response to a spate of complaints of misbehaviour against inebriated men hanging around the outlet.
The referendum of sorts that brought out the grit of the women fighting the menace under an all-party banner for the last six months also witnessed the entire gamut of unfair practices that are common in political elections of the world’s largest democracy.
Interestingly, the fountainhead of resistance to the campaign for closing the liquor shop is former mayor and Congress activist Pandurang Hiwarkar, who owns the building housing the shop and is also said to be its proxy partner.
Hiwarkar’s men Saturday distributed a pamphlet bearing his photograph maligning the leader of the all-party women’s front, Umatai Pimpalkar of the Bharatiya Janata Party (IANS).
On Sunday, the day of polling, he allegedly sponsored a picnic for the ward’s women, spiriting them away in three buses so as to prevent them from voting.
Pimpalkar alleged that shop owner Vivek Jaiswal had previously approached her with a blank cheque, urging her to withdraw the agitation.
As the polling started in the morning, a group of men menacingly hung around the polling booth trying to scare away the women from casting votes while another bunch of rowdies attacked a woman activist’s car and forcibly took away the keys, the women leading the campaign alleged.
“The men signalled me to stop the car and one of them took away the keys as I was pleading with them to clear our way,” said Shail Jamini, a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader here who was moving in the ward along with other activists.
“In fact the resistance and intrigue began from homes with several men hiding away the family ration cards that women were required to take along to prove their identity at the polling booth,” Jamini told IANS.
“But the women outwitted their men by bringing the voter identity card that served the purpose.”
While many women thus showed rare grit against the odds and exercised their franchise, the scare created by bullies in the locality, browbeating at home and distractions like the picnic did work to keep the polling figure to 43 percent – far lower than the activists expected.
Another dampener for the trend-setting women was a court directive that barred the authorities from counting the votes and declaring the result till further orders while allowing them to conduct the poll.
The court’ directive came in response to a petition filed by Jaiswal challenging the poll, saying that the collector did not grant him a hearing before passing the poll order.