The 15-year-old died of his injuries in a hospital in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh after the suspect fled the area.
Police in India are searching for a teacher accused of beating a Dalit student to death over a spelling mistake, officials said amid violent protests sparked by the incident.
Nikhil Dohre was beaten with a pole and kicked until he fell unconscious by his high school teacher earlier this month after he misspelled the word “social” in an exam, according to a police complaint from his father.
The 15-year-old died of his injuries at a hospital in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh on Monday, after the suspect fled the area.
“He is on the run but we will arrest him soon,” police officer Mahendra Pratap Singh told AFP.
Formerly known as the “untouchables,” the Dalit community is at the bottom of India’s caste system and has faced prejudice and discrimination for centuries.
Al Jazeera’s Pavni Mittal, reporting from New Delhi, said violent protests had broken out in Auraiya district, the site of the attack, calling for the teacher’s arrest before the boy’s body was cremated.
“The family says the boy was hit by his teacher a few weeks ago because of a spelling mistake. Now the family has called this a caste-based hate crime,” she said.
Hundreds of people took to the streets on Monday and set fire to a police vehicle. About a dozen protesters were arrested, police officer Singh said.
“We used force to quell the mob and the situation soon came under control,” Police Superintendent Charu Nigam told reporters.
Mittal said there is growing anger against casteism and caste-based violence in India, where untouchability “is forbidden but remains widespread”.
“According to the government, hate crimes take place in five castes every hour on average in the country,” she said.
Riya Singh, co-founder of the organization Dalit Women Fight, told Al Jazeera the incident was “a reflection of the deep-rooted caste hatred that members of the upper or dominant caste hold towards Dalits”.
“The hatred is still so strong that it even extends to young children and ends up killing them,” she said.
Singh said the country should accept that caste bias exists and that people use crime and violence to justify their caste bias. “Only with this confirmation can we move forward.” She said.