An Indian teenager who dared to write a love letter to a sweetheart from a higher caste was beaten and paraded through the streets before being thrown under a train and killed.
Manish Kumar, 15, a member of India’s Dalit, or “Untouchable”, community, was seized by a gang of men as he went to his village school.
He was beaten and his head was shaved before he was thrown on to the tracks, as his mother begged for mercy, witnesses said. It was alleged that police looked on as the incident took place.
A teenager has since been arrested and a policeman has been suspended. Five other men were detained.
“The accused killed the boy for writing a love letter to a girl of the same village. There was a scuffle and he was pushed under a train,” Rajesh Kumar, the superintendent of police in Kaimur, the district of the impoverished northern state of Bihar where the attack took place, told The Times.
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“Caste-based atrocities are common here: rapes, murders, beatings. The privileged prey on the weak,” said Uday Kumar, a director of the Bihar-based Dalit Association for Social and Human Rights Awareness. Similar abuses are reported regularly across India. Alamelu, the leader of a group of Dalit women in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, said: “If a Dalit labourer is a girl, it’s accepted that they will be sexually exploited. Our high-caste landlords might consider us untouchable in the daytime, but at night it’s a different matter.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5197439.eceI found these stories especially sad. :(
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