“She’s a brave little one,” says Lakshavva, Pooja’s neighbour, as the young girl curls up and buries her face in her mother Bishtavva’s lap. “She stands up for her mother and gives it back to her father whenever she can but there’s only that much a little child can do.” Still trying to hide within the folds of her mother’s saree, Pooja—her dark, straight, uncombed hair covering most of her face—lets out a shy smile when she hears the villagers praising her.

Every night, as her alcoholic father begins to abuse and beat her mother, 10-year-old Pooja runs out of her house to call for help from others living in her village.

Pooja lives in Valmiki Nagar, a colony chalked out for Scheduled Castes in Linganmath, a village located around 34 kilometres from Dharwad in the South Indian state of Karnataka. On the day I met Pooja earlier this month, the women in her village had gathered for a special meeting that afternoon. Their agenda? To write letters to the state heads of India’s two key political parties—BS Yeddyurappa, the head of the Karnataka state unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Dinesh Gundu Rao, the President of Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee—informing them that the residents of Valmiki Nagar are rejecting the candidates fielded by them in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, and have instead, decided to choose the ‘None of the Above’ (NOTA) option. (Linganmath goes to polls on April 23 along with the rest of North Karnataka).

The reason? No political party has offered to ban alcohol in Karnataka, thereby discarding a long-standing demand of rural women from across the state.

“Our lives are ruined because of this wretched liquor and we cannot take this torture anymore,” Lakshavva tells VICE. “Our drunk husbands waste their earnings on alcohol and beat us when we refuse to give them our hard-earned money to buy more alcohol. Even young boys have started drinking and some have even died due to excessive drinking.”