What can one say about the brief life of Inder Meghwal, nine years old? The child was a student in a Rajasthan village school. Last month, he reportedly drank water from a pot reserved for an “upper caste” teacher. His teacher beat him so severely that he died in unbearable pain in hospital days later.
Later stories have variously suggested that there was no separate pot for the teacher’s water; that all the children and adults in the school drank water from the same tank in the school compound; that the child had been fighting with a classmate over a book, which is why he got beaten; that he had already had an ear infection for some time when he was beaten; further, even that there was no discrimination at all in the school where little Inder studied, or indeed in the village itself.
And yet everyone who understands the reality of oppressive social inequities can imagine the truth of what happened within that classroom. For little Inder was a Dalit child.
