School teacher assaults Dalit student in Madhya Pradesh
Bhopal: A government school teacher has assaulted a Dalit student in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Madhya Pradesh state of India.
According to Kashmir Media Service, a Dalit student, identified as Raju Jatav, has said that a government school teacher beat him and hurled a caste slur after he took water from the teacher’s bottle in Shivpuri district.
According to the student, the accused teacher, identified as Lokesh Sharma, shouted a caste slur, telling the student, “You Chamar (caste name), don’t touch my bottle,” before physically assaulting him inside the classroom.
The Chamar community is one of the largest Scheduled Caste (SC) communities in Madhya Pradesh and has historically faced caste-based discrimination.
Three of his classmates, who witnessed the incident confirmed the student’s account, stating that the teacher used a casteist slur, objected to the boy touching the bottle, and beat him in front of other students.
The incident has triggered outrage after videos surfaced in which the student recounts the incident.
Anti-caste activist Saurabh Kumar Bauddh condemned the assault, saying, “The entire world must see the heinous caste humiliation our kids face since childhood.”
Bauddh said he had spoken to the father of the Dalit student, Raju Jatav.
“Casteist Lokesh Sharma will never be forgiven. Those behind the ‘Reservation Hatao’ movement should see the truth,” Bauddh said, in an apparent reference to the recent “Reservation Hatao” social media campaign.
“A child being treated as ‘untouchable’ inside a classroom is a reminder that casteism is not history; it is a lived reality,” said The Dalit Voice, an Ambedkarite advocacy account on X.
