NEW DELHI // Indian police have detained two schoolboys accused of repeatedly beating a Dalit classmate for getting good grades.
The 16-year-old sent a letter to a national television network pleading for the violence to stop, after a video of him being punched and kicked in a classroom made headline news.
The beatings, which the boy says took place every day for two years, are the latest incidents of violence against Dalits, who lie at the bottom of India’s deeply entrenched social hierarchy system.
Police said they took action after studying the video, taken and uploaded by another boy, which shows the Dalit child being punched, kicked and slapped at a government-run school in Bihar state.
“He was being tortured for quite some time,” Babban Baitha, the investigating police officer from Muzaffarpur district, said.
“We went through the video which was recorded at the behest of the attackers themselves, and sent them to remand.”
Dalits, known as “untouchables”, were historically denied a school education and instead performed dirty and menial jobs from a young age.
“You see, I am a Dalit and so doing well in the examinations or academics, which brings me praise at home, earns me humiliation and abuse in my classroom,” the boy said in his letter to the NDTV network.
“You tell me, how should I cope and prepare?” he said of his final school exams due next year.
The video comes after Dalit protests erupted in July over the public flogging of a group of Dalits wrongly accused of killing a cow.
A video of that incident in Gujarat also went viral and prompted enraged Dalits to call for an end to outlawed but still practised caste discrimination.
Prime minister Narendra Modi repeated his call for a halt to attacks on Dalits, saying at a public rally that “my head hangs in shame” every time he hears of one.
* Agence France-Presse
