New Delhi, Oct 20 (AFP): Police detained two schoolboys accused of repeatedly beating a lower-caste classmate who scored good grades, an officer said on Wednesday, after a video of the attack went viral on social media.

The 16-year-old Dalit boy released a letter to a television network pleading for the violence to stop, after the video of him being punched and kicked in a classroom made headlines.

The beatings, which the boy says took place every day for two years, are the latest incidents of violence against Dalits.

Police said they took action after studying the video, taken by another boy and uploaded, which shows the teen being punched, kicked and slapped at a government-run school in Bihar.

“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,” Baitha said, pending the conclusion of his investigation.

“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 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 in Gujarat’s Una.
A video of that incident also went viral and prompted enraged Dalits to call for an end to the discrimination and violence.