Police in India are investigating a teacher after a video of her encouraging kids to hit their 7-year-old Muslim classmate provoked considerable outrage across India.

The footage of the event in the Muzaffarnagar area of northern Uttar Pradesh shows the child standing frightened in front of his classmates while the teacher instructs them to attack him.

PHOTO | COURTESY teacher allowing students to slap classmate 

The child sobs as his classmates smack him individually while the teacher instructs them to do it "properly." As the boy wails and the slapping continues, a man can be heard laughing.

Satyanarayan Prajapat, the superintendent of police in Muzaffarnagar, claimed on Friday that the teacher encouraged students to attack the youngster "for not remembering his times tables."

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According to Prajapati, the teacher also mentioned the boy's faith.

"The female teacher declared: 'When the mothers of Mohammedan (one who follows Islam) students don't pay attention to their children's studies, their performance is ruined," he claimed.



The district police have charged the teacher, and an inquiry is continuing. The teacher has not been charged formally. District officials have also ordered the school to close.

The boy's father told CNN that his youngster was "restless and scared" following the Thursday event. While the youngster is doing much better today, he "was unable to sleep earlier and was left in shock" after that, according to him.

PHOTO | COURTESY Teacher in question

The incident has sparked widespread outrage and outrage in India, the world's largest democracy with 1.4 billion people, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Hindu nationalist policies have exacerbated communal tensions and created an atmosphere of fear and alienation among minority groups, according to rights groups and government critics.

A prominent opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, accused the instructor of "sowing the poison of discrimination in the minds of innocent children." "Turning a holy place like school into a market place of hatred - there is nothing worse that a teacher can do for the country," he wrote on Twitter, now known as X.