Karat touches the wall. Picture by Siva

Madurai, May 7: Prakash Karat today saw in a tiny Tamil Nadu hamlet what he would have had he visited Nandigram now.

Divided by a social wall for 18 years, Dalits of Uthapuram, 60km from Madurai, today gave a rousing reception to the CPM leader who has been campaigning to pull down the concrete divide separating them from the upper castes.

“For how long do we put up with this life?” asked an anguished Easwari, a Dalit woman in her late 40s, as she squatted on the dirt track running through the village that has just begun to breathe easy after the first breach in the wall that is 10-foot high and 2,000-foot long. The Tamil Nadu government had pulled down a small portion — around 15 feet — of the wall yesterday to reopen an old pathway joining the Dalit and the upper caste areas.

Easwari may well have echoed the 28-year-old woman in Nandigram, some 2,000km away in Bengal’s East Midnapore district, who, on Monday, had to run naked for half a kilometre. The woman, now recuperating in a Nandigram hospital, was chased by supporters of the CPM — the party Karat that heads — who had stripped and thrashed her for refusing to campaign for the party in the coming rural elections.

As in Nandigram, Uthapuram resembled a fortress, encircled by hundreds of policemen as Karat took the fight against untouchability into the heart of the village.

“Dalits are still served tea in a different tumbler in the village teashops. We can’t shave at the local barber shop and the village dhobi refuses to wash our clothes,” said Ponniah, an elderly Dalit of the village.

Ponniah would not know Jyotindranath Das of Satengabari, a victim of the us-versus-them battle in Nandigram. Das fled with his family to Nandigram town after handing over his voter identity card to the CPM cadres and also put his thumb impression on a blank piece of paper. The CPM has warned villagers that their land would be taken away if the party lost the panchayat polls in Nandigram.

Most upper caste residents of Uthapuram (mainly from the Pillaimar community) stayed away as Karat went around the perimeter of the wall to see for himself how it had divided the village into two parts.

“Today is a historic day for Uthapuram, Tamil Nadu and our country. After 18 years, the wall of shame that had divided the people which symbolised caste oppression and discrimination, we have made the first breach,” Karat said from an open-air stage after examining sections of the structure for 30 minutes.

The CPM leader said the state government needs to take more steps such as making all public spaces in the village accessible to Dalits, including the shade of a Peepul tree, the nearby Muthalamman temple and a bus shelter.

Of the 400 and odd upper caste households in the village, around 300 had surrendered their ration cards to the Madurai district collector and had trooped out of Uthapuram, ostensibly to the surrounding hills nearby, in protest against any move to demolish the wall. Their argument is that the wall was raised with the consent of all groups after a major caste clash in 1989 as a protective measure and to avert fresh skirmishes.