Dozens of students at an Indian school are suspected of tying a math teacher and a school clerk to a tree and beating them, after a number of them received poor grades on an exam.
In a shocking incident that took place last Monday, students of the Scheduled Tribe Residential School in Dumka, India’s Jharkhand state, lured their math teacher and a school clerk to the school campus under the pretext of discussing their grades on a recent Class-9 examination only to tie them to a tree and allegedly beat them. Photos and videos doing the rounds on social media show three men tied to a tree with red rope and dozens of male students roaming around them and carrying thick wooden sticks.
Videos of the incident quickly went viral, and although the beating itself wasn’t captured on camera, a police investigation found that the victims were indeed physically assaulted by the angry students, and one of them actually gave a statement with a bandage around his head, indicating that he had been hit with a bat.
The students’ violent reaction was allegedly triggered by a number of very bad grades that some of them received on their Class-9 math exam. India Times reports that 11 students out of a class of 32 received a DD grade, which is equivalent to a fail, which sparked the anger of the entire student body. They held both the math teacher, Suman Kumar, and the clerk who uploaded the grades to the school website, Soneram Chaure, responsible and exacted their revenge.
“Students called us on the pretext of holding a meeting & said their results were spoiled,” Suman Kumar told the ANI press agency. “It happened because their practical marks were not included in results. That was to be done by the headmaster. So we couldn’t have taken any step in this regard.”
The angry students wouldn’t listen to the victims’ explanation, though, and reportedly proceeded to tie them to a tree and beat them with sticks. According to the ongoing police investigations, the majority of the 200 students at Scheduled Tribe Residential School were involved in the incident.
Despite having been presented the evidence collected by police in relation to this case, school officials decided not to file any complaint against the students involved in the lynching, because “it might spoil the careers of the students,” Gopikandar police station chief, Nityanand Bhokta, told reporters.
In the beginning, the victims themselves didn’t file complaints either, but as the case went viral, they eventually filed a complaint against 11 of their assailants. It’s unclear what their punishment might be.
