At the police station, Sampat is greeted with smiles, friendly gestures and cooperation. It has taken her 30 years to get here, she says. The journey began with her slapping a man who abused his wife. Soon women started coming to her for advice on marital problems, then for larger issues of safety and security. When she was 20, a group of Kol (indigenous tribe) women approached her because non-tribal men were sexually assaulting them. Sampat managed to convince the district administration that the solution was community land rights for Kol housing (and this was two decades before the Forest Rights Act). The convincing became easy because Sampat organised these women (around 200) in protest in front of the district magistrate’s office. It soon became her modus operandi—peaceful protests outside police stations and government offices. Initially, the police wielded batons. But Sampat and her band of merry women learned to give it back. “Once, a policeman tried to beat us up, we tied him and gave him a good beating. There are two pending cases of assault against me,” she says.