Kolkata: On April 29, a teacher died by suicide in Bengal. Birendranath Soren belonged to a tribal community in Bhutsahar village of Bankura district. Soren is reportedly among 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff whose recruitment has been quashed.
By all accounts and experts’ views, the Calcutta high court’s order in the School Service Commission exam scam looks to be one of the biggest poll issues in the state now. Many are comparing its social impact to the Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh.
Birendranath Soren. Photo: By arrangement.
The Calcutta high court had said on April 22 that the new appointment procedure has to begin within 15 days of the Lok Sabha polls ending. Salaries of those who have been appointed illegally have to be returned with 12% interest in four weeks. The Central Bureau of Investigation will continue to probe the matter. All OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets will need to be uploaded on the SSC website. Investigations will also be made into who it was that created new posts for recruitment.
The Supreme Court a day ago restrained the CBI from taking any “precipitative action” against the officials of Bengal government in the case. However, the apex court called the matter a “complete fraud.” Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud said that that the figure of “25,000” was a huge one and exactly at which stages there was corruption needs to be probed. Noteworthy was the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress’s line of defence that, “The whole cabinet will be in jail during the elections,” if the apex court does not grant a stay. The apex court will hear the matter again on May 6.
Political analyst Subhamoy Mitra tells The Wire that while there is anger over the fact that “20,000 are being made to suffer for the illegal appointments of 5,000,” it is also widely acknowledged that the TMC government has had a vital role to play in this scam.
“That Banerjee is blaming opposition leaders for this imbroglio at this juncture is political posturing. While we can see the anger, we cannot say how impactful this will immediately be to the TMC’s poll prospects. We must remember that schemes like the Lakshmir Bhandar have made the poor especially happy. But if the TMC thinks that welfare measures will earn them people’s support even for widespread corruption in teachers’ appointments, then it is a sad day for democracy,” Mitra added.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Under the Lakshmir Bhandar, girls and women between 16 and 60 years of age get Rs 1,000 every month.
In the 13 years during which TMC has been in power, the School Service Commission exam has taken place twice. The primary school Teacher Eligibility Test has taken place four times. For each one of these four tests and at every step from the publication of results to the appointment of employees, there have been multiple allegations of layers of corruption.
The high court has now lent credence to the claim that teachers are being appointed in exchange of money. Among those already in jail are the state’s former education minister Partha Chatterjee, his aide Arpita Chatterjee, MLA Manik Bhattacharya, his family, former chairman of the school service commission’s advisory committee Shanti Prasad Sinha, education secretary Kalyanmoy Ganguly, former SSC secretary Subiresh Bhattacharya, and middlemen Ashok Saha, Pradip Singh, Prasanna Ray, Kuntal Ghosh and Chandan Mondal. Hundreds of crores of rupees have been allegedly recovered.
The Calcutta high court had considered a 300-page report by the CBI and highlighted 17 issues. A bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Mohammed Shabbar Rashidi had said that the SSC had wilfully destroyed proofs and meet secretly to hand over the scanning of OMR sheets to a company called NYSA which then handed the same job over to another company, ScanTech. The SSC’s own server has no reports on OMR scans and yet, the scanned copies were not preserved and destroyed, the court found. There were more appointments than vacancies. Some of those who had submitted blank OMR sheets got jobs. There were no merit lists published. No guidelines for appointments had been adhered to, the court observed.
The curious case of Suvendu Adhikari
Meanwhile, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has mounted an offensive on the issue.
“The matter of regularising the excessive appointments goes directly up to chief minister Mamata Banerjee. She held a cabinet meeting on May 5, 2022, from which she gave these directions,” BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, formerly a TMC leader who was close to Banerjee, said.
Adhikari, incidentally, was a senior leader in the TMC when the SSC exam took place in 2016 and also in Banerjee’s cabinet till 2020, when he left to join the BJP. Many have asked as to why he did not say anything about the wrongdoings when he was in the government.
Pradesh Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury was one who said that the BJP leaders who are speaking of the recruitment scam now were ministers in Mamata Banerjee’s cabinet when the scam took place. “They should all be investigated,” he said.
Meanwhile, Adhikari also said that the TMC government was sacrificing 20,000 people to protect 5,400 illegally appointed teaching and non-teaching staff.
Student wings of the Left parties have held agitations on a similar claim, noting that the jobs of all who were given employment in that drive cannot be cancelled. The All Bengal Teachers’ Association has promised free legal help to those who had got their jobs legally but have now lost them.
‘Job eater’
Banerjee, on the other hand, has called the high court’s landmark judgment “political.”
“It is nowhere said that we have to accept all court orders. We will appeal at the Supreme Court,” she had earlier said.
Banerjee has in turn pointed fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “When he has seen that there is not much else to do he has decided to demolish jobs. This order is your party’s doing,” she said.
At a rally in Malda, she said, “He has eaten so many people’s jobs,” ostensibly referring to the prime minister.
The current education minister in Banerjee’s cabinet, Bratya Basu, said a day ago that “Ram-baam” – the Bengali for ‘Left’ is baam – are happy that so many teachers have lost jobs.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) state secretary Mohammed Salim said that far from cheering at the loss of jobs, the party has maintained from the beginning that recruitment has been illegally done by the TMC. “It is clear that a lot of money has been exchanged for this recruitment process. A group of ministers and bureaucrats have gone to jail. The most terrible thing is that meritorious students who studied for the tests saw that those who submitted blank sheets got jobs. This is the state’s collective shame. How did the chief minister not know this? Crores were being looted and she knew nothing?” Salim asked.
Translated from the Bengali original by Soumashree Sarkar.
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