viral video
Indian teacher urges children to hit Muslim classmates – police investigate
Students in India (icon image)
© Soumen Hazra / Getty Images
A viral video shows several children beating a boy at a school in India – on instructions from the teacher. It should also have been about the religion of the Muslim student.
A video from a school causes in India for outrage. The scene in question took place in the state of Uttar Pradesh in the north of the country. A seven-year-old boy is standing at the front of the classroom, one by one classmates step up and hit him – on the teacher’s instructions.
One student slaps the boy on the cheek, another on the forehead, and a third on the hip. The teacher sits next to it at a table and asks the children to hit the student “properly”. The video, which is reported by CNN and the BBC, among others, is the subject of intense debate in India. Not only because of violence at school, but also because the student is said to have been discriminated against because of his religion.
Discussion in India: teacher rejects allegations
“The teacher said, ‘If the mother of a Mohammedan student doesn’t watch his homework, it will ruin his achievements,'” CNN quoted the police chief of the Muzaffarnagar district as saying, where the situation took place. The student was punished because he forgot his timetable.
The police are now investigating the teacher, but so far there have been no official charges against her. As CNN reports, the authorities have closed the school for the time being. However, the teacher denies the allegations. She claims the seven-year-old boy’s father asked her to punish his son. Since she couldn’t get up herself because of a disability, she asked her classmates to hit the boy. “The father brought him to me and said that I should put him on the right path,” explained the teacher. “Because I can’t get up, I figured I’d let a kid or two hit him.”
The father, on the other hand, said his son was “terrified” after the incident and couldn’t sleep. The boy now goes to another school. In India, the case triggered a broad discussion. The prominent opposition politician Rahul Gandhi accused the teacher of “fixing the poison of discrimination in the minds of innocent children”. “Children are the future of India – don’t hate them, we must all teach them love together.”