New Delhi: Indian police have detained two schoolboys accused of repeatedly beating a low-caste classmate for getting good grades, an officer said Wednesday, with a video of the attacks going viral.

The 16-year-old from India’s lowest Dalit caste released a letter to a national television network pleading for the violence to stop, after the video of him being punched and kicked in a classroom made headline news.

The beatings, which the boy says took place every day for two years, are the latest incidents of violence against Dalits, who lie at the bottom of India’s deeply entrenched social hierarchy system.

Police said they took action after studying the video, taken by another boy and uploaded, which shows the Dalit being punched, kicked and slapped at a government-run school in the eastern state of Bihar.

‘He was being tortured for quite some time,’ Babban Baitha, the investigating police officer, told AFP by phone from Muzaffarpur district.