On September 29, a school teacher accused of beating his student to death was arrested. Cops say it’s an isolated murder, but his family says it isn’t.
Nikhit Dohre came home from school without his usual cheerful disposition. Normally, the 15-year-old would dive into chores to make life easy for his economically-disadvantaged family. But on September 7, Nikhit came back with blood oozing from his face, and his body covered in deep-blue bruises.
Nikhit’s family lives in the dusty underbelly of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has the highest caste-based hate crime rates in the country. He told his family that his upper-caste teacher, a man named Ashwini Singh, beat him with a metal rod for making a mistake in a school test. For the next 10 days, Nikhit was in and out of hospitals. On Monday, Nikhit succumbed to his injuries.
“My son’s mistake was not to get a wrong answer in a test. It was his caste,” Nikhit’s father Raju Dohre told VICE World News.
In the world’s largest democracy, Hindus still practise the 3,000-year-old social hierarchy that divides them into four supposedly divinely ordained groups. Dalits, like the Dohres, fall outside the Hindu caste system, and are subjected to the banned practice of untouchability, daily humiliation and extreme violence.
India banned the caste-based hate crime of “untouchability” in 1950, but the discriminatory caste system has had a violent uptake with the resurgence of Hindu nationalism across the country. A person of “Scheduled Caste” – the official term for 1,109 oppressed castes – faces a hate crime every 10 minutes in India. In the last two months, at least four children from oppressed castes, including Nikhit, have died after allegedly being beaten in classrooms by their teachers from dominant castes.
This story was originally published in vice.com . Read the full story here