A FORTNIGHT after he allegedly died by suicide after hours of being thrashed in a cowshed, the death of a 12-year-old Dalit boy is being investigated as a caste crime in Himachal Pradesh.

The Class 6 student, belonging to the Koli community, was reportedly beaten up for entering the house of a Rajput family at village Limbda in Rohru subdivision on September 16. The breaking point, according to his relatives, was the demand by the upper-caste family that they provide a goat as punishment, which would be slaughtered to “purify” the house the boy had “polluted”.

An initial FIR was filed on September 20, three days after the 12-year-old died. The stringent SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was slapped against the accused Pushpa Devi, 57, on September 26. By then, on September 25, she had

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