Police said the principal, who is also visually impaired,
and a teacher were arrested in the southern city of Kakinada amid public
outrage over the incident.
The video showed three children at a boarding school in the
state of Andhra Pradesh cowering, wailing and begging their attacker to stop
hitting them.
Police said the incident took place Friday at the Greenfield
Residential School for the blind in Kakinada.
“We registered a case
against the correspondent (the teacher) and the principal,” deputy police
superintendent Vijay Bhaskar Reddy told AFP.
“Three students were handled (roughly),” Reddy said.
The fuzzy video footage appears to show the principal
holding three little boys down one by one and whacking them with a cane as they
crouched and begged for mercy.
The two accused were set to appear in court Wednesday after
police filed preliminary child cruelty charges over the beatings.
It was not immediately clear who took the video.
After the images appeared, angry parents and other locals on
Monday stormed the school and beat up the principal, according to footage aired
on television.
The video showed men punching the principal and kicking him
off his chair, throwing notebooks, files and a plastic chair at him as well as
shouting abuse.
Angry locals continued to rain blows on the accused as
police took him away from his office.
The attack on the principal came as Indian police beat back
angry protesters on Monday who attempted to storm a top school in the city of
Bangalore where a six-year-old girl was allegedly raped.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights
(NCPCR) has demanded an inquiry into the caning incident.
“A report has been sought on the incident and the action
taken. Such kind of corporal punishment is unacceptable,” NCPCR Chief Kushal
Singh said, according to CNN-IBN network.
A Supreme Court judgement in 2000 prohibited corporal
punishment in India but the practice remains rife.
A 12-year-old boy hanged himself in 2010 in the eastern city
of Kolkata after being caned by his teacher.
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