Dalit boy assaulted, forced to lick feet in UP, 8 arrested

Eight youths were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Raebareli on Tuesday after a viral video showed a Dalit teenager being assaulted, humiliated and made to lick the feet of one of the accused. A senior police officer said that the incident took place on April 10 but the video went viral on social media on Sunday. The FIR was lodged on the same day based on a complaint by the teenager, a student of Class X. Harikeh Singh, SHO of the local police station, said, “We have arrested all the eight accused. Some of the accused are minors. We are arranging the paperwork and will take further action accordingly. It was a case of enmity between the boys which led to the incident. 

The FIR has been lodged under the IPC section for assault while the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has also been invoked. ”A 2 min 30-second video viral on social media shows the boy sitting on the ground with his hands on his ears - a sign of punishment. The accused can be sitting on motorcycles, some of them laughing as the victim shakes in fear on the ground. One of the accused asks the victim the spell the name 'Thakur' - an upper caste and also abuses him. "Will you make such a mistake again?" another accused asks the victim. The victim is a class 10 student and lives with his widowed mother. Initial reports suggested that the victim's mother had worked in the fields of some of the accused and the boy had been asking them for money for the said work. But at the home of the victim, his sisters denied this. "It's not true. In fact, it is still not clear why my brother was assaulted. He told us that he asked the attackers why they were beating him and got no convincing answer," one of the sisters, a 19-year-old, said.