Murdered for writing love letter to girl ..

Bombay
An Indian teenager who dared to write a love letter to a sweetheart from a higher caste was beaten and paraded through the streets of his village before being thrown under a train.

Manish Kumar, 15, a member of India's Dalit, or "untouchable" community, a group condemned to carry out the country's very worst jobs, was seized as he made his way to school.

The boy was beaten and his hair shaved before he was thrown onto the tracks as his mother begged for mercy. He died from injuries.

Witnesses have alleged that the police looked on while the assault took place. One teenager has been arrested and a policeman suspended. Five other men are being detained.

"The accused killed the boy for writing a love letter to a girl of the same village. There was a scuffle, and he was pushed in front of a train," Superintendant Rajesh Kumar told The Times. Supt Kumar heads the police in Kaimur, the district of the impoverished northern state of Bihar where the attack took place, .

Manish was a member of the Ravidas community, a subset of the Dalits that has historically been confined to working with leather, a profession deemed unclean by Hindus, who consider cows sacred.

Three months ago, he had sent a letter "expressing his interest" in a girl from the Dhobi community – another Dalit group, which has traditionally washed clothes for a living and is fractionally above the Ravidas in the Hindu hierarchy.

Activists said that murder underscored how even India's oppressed Dalit community is riven by the caste system, a rigid social structure that dictates that a person's birth governs their profession and status.

Dr Prakash Louis, a sociologist based in Bihar, said: "The intense cruelty of this attack has captured the interest of the media, but similar incidents are occurring daily."

India's hugely complex caste system groups the country's dominant Hindu population into four varnas, a term that can be translated as "category" or "colour": the priest Brahmins; warrior Kshatriyas; merchant or farmer Vaishyas and artisan Sudras. The Dalits are placed beneath this hierarchy.

The structure is further complicated by the associated Jati system, which divides the society into thousands of subgroups based on occupation.