An 11-year-old schoolboy has been stripped naked, hung upside down from a crossbar and tortured by a 50-year-old neighbour in South 24-Parganas, in retaliation for an accidental poke during a children's game.
The horrific incident occurred on June 14, but remained buried under a shroud of trauma and intimidation until Thursday, when a mobile phone video of the assault leaked online, sparking widespread public fury and prompting a police manhunt.
The Class V student was playing with his friends when a cane stick he was holding inadvertently struck his neighbour, Tapan Halder, who was walking down the adjacent lane.
Local sources said Halder reacted with instant, disproportionate aggression, dragging the boy by his hair, slapping him, and forcing him to kneel while holding his ears in a public apology.
The humiliation, however, was only a prelude. Later that evening, as the boy walked home, Halder allegedly ambushed the minor, dragging him inside his residence to execute a sadistic ordeal.
In the purported video, which Halder recorded himself, the child is seen crying out for mercy while suspended upside down in the nude as the older man beats him. According to the victim’s family, the brutality unfolded in full view of Halder’s family members and several neighbours, none of whom intervened to stop it.
Terrified by explicit threats of further violence if he spoke out, the traumatised boy remained silent upon returning home that night.
Suspicion arose when his parents noticed severe bruising across his body. Despite immediate treatment at Baruipur Sub-district Hospital, the boy refused to disclose the cause of his injuries out of sheer panic. The truth finally emerged on Wednesday when a relative of the accused inadvertently leaked the digital recording Halder had captured.
The discovery prompted the family to rush the child back to Baruipur Hospital, where he underwent a head CT scan and chest X-rays. Nearly two weeks after the assault, he remains too physically broken and in too much pain to attend school.
The torture of the boy has ignited unrest in the area.
"Not only just Tapan Halder but also all members of his family and some others are similarly responsible for the torture," the victim's distraught mother said, demanding the harshest punishment for the trauma inflicted on her son.
"I have not yet received any justice for the kind of torture that was inflicted on my son. I want him to be hanged upside down like this," the boy's mother said.
As public outrage mounts, Joynagar police have registered a criminal case, though Halder and his immediate family fled the village the moment the video went viral. Even within his own extended family, support has evaporated. "None of us is supporting this incident," Halder’s sister-in-law said, speaking from an adjacent house.
"I was in the house next door; if I had known that something like this was happening in that house, I would have stopped it immediately. The accused needs to be punished."
A senior officer at the Joynagar police station said a search was underway to apprehend Halder.
"A case has been started. We are looking for the accused person. We are hopeful that he will be arrested soon," the officer said.