In Anekal, a love letter isolates a community

The caste divide between the Dalit and the Gowda communities in Karpur, a non-descript village in Karnataka’s Anekal Taluk is quite obvious.  The asphalted road that leads to the village, which is about 40 km from India’s Silicon Valley, clearly demarcates the Dalit kheri (Dalit colony) from the houses of the dominant cases. The rules are simple. Dalits cannot visit temples. Clean water is out of bounds and they cannot enter an upper caste house.

There’s mistrust and disgust in every corner but now the divide has deepened. A week back a teenage Dalit boy wrote a love letter to a high school student from the Gowda community. The letter worsened the mess in the village, which has been recognized by the state government as a suvarna grama (model village).

“The 15-year-old boy’s letter to the eight standard girl enraged the girl’s relatives. They came to our kheri and picked up a fight and bashed up at least eight members of our community,” a girl from the Dalit kheri told DNA.

The Dalits thought it was over but the next day, when some women from their community went to fetch water from the farm, they were told to leave. “They said they won’t give water to people from the Dalit community. They abused us, and asked us how a boy from our community could dare to write a love letter,” the girl added.

It got worse. The Dalits were shooed away from tea shops in the village. They were told to stay away from Gowda farms, from where they were drawing water. Nobody in the Dalit kheri wants to talk about the incident.

“If we talk about this, it will become difficult for us to reside here. We accept that the boy is at fault. But abusing the whole community is not right. People from the Dalit community are being refused tea even at tea stalls,” the girl said.

“It is true that people from the Gowda community have refused to give drinking water to the Dalits. They were angry and it is an obvious reaction. It is common in villages. The people running the tea stalls were unhappy with the incident and they refused to give tea. This is natural in villages,” said T Ramesh, a former gram panchayat president.

He said that not providing tea or water to the community doesn’t amount to discrimination or social boycott. But the water ban has hit the Dalits hard. “We are now using borewell water, which we earlier used for washing and cleaning,” said Hemanvathy N.

The village, with a population of 1,120, is composed of mainly three castes. The gowda community forms the majority with a population of 800; then come the Dalits (200), the Lingayats (100) and the other castes (20)