At the beginning of June, when a teacher at a government-sponsored school in Parokata gram panchayat of Alipurduar district in northern West Bengal applied for a loan from Uttarbanga Kshetriya Gramin Bank, a regional rural bank sponsored by Central Bank of India, he was asked to produce a unique document—a certificate of passing the state’s Teacher Eligibility Test (TET). The branch manager later told the media that they were taking no risks while disbursing loans to teachers in government -aided and -sponsored schools, and were therefore asking for the TET result.
In mid-June, a woman in Cooch Behar district’s Nishiganj area sat on dharna in front of the house of a college lecturer. She alleged that she was having a romantic affair with the lecturer but he stopped taking her calls since she lost her school teaching job following a high court order.
By the end of the month, the matrimonial columns in a Bengali daily featured an advertisement saying that parents of a woman in Uttar Dinajpur district were looking for a ‘suitable groom’—that excluded school teachers.
For ages, school teachers have remained a favourite as prospective grooms or brides in Bengali middle class society. But a chain of events that unfolded since the end of last year has so far resulted in the Calcutta high court terminating the services of over 1,200 employees in state government -aided and -sponsored schools, terming their appointments as fraudulent and illegal.
This included 271 assistant teachers for classes IX and X, 609 Group D employees and 381 clerical (Group C) posts. All these recruitments happened through the School Service Commission (SSC) between 2017 and 2019. The court has ordered stopping their salaries immediately, leaving open the scope for asking for a refund of every rupee they have received as salaries. The CBI is also free to ask them how they got their jobs, the court said. Several of these teachers hadn’t qualified in the TET at all.
One of the school teachers who faced termination of job is Ankita Adhikary, daughter of current minister of state for education, Paresh Adhikary. A Left Front leader and minister during the last Left Front government in the state (2006-2011), Adhikary switched over to Trinamool Congress (TMC) in 2019, following which his daughter’s name jumped ranks in the waiting list. The court, in May, ordered Ankita to return all money received as salary within two months, while Paresh is facing a CBI probe.
In this backdrop, last week’s arrest of TMC heavyweight Partha Chatterjee, who was the education minister when the school recruitment scam took place, has left Mamata Banerjee’s party on a sticky wicket. It’s not the first time a major scam has hit the TMC. Neither is the sight of the TMC chief defending her party leaders arrested by central government agencies on charges of corruption a rare one. She roared and thundered, blaming political use of central agencies in all such cases.
Many still remember how, in November 2014, Banerjee led a rally in Calcutta after the CBI arrested TMC Rajya Sabha MP Srinjoy Bose in connection with the Rs 2,500 crore Saradha chit fund scam, and sent summons to several other party leaders, including ministers Madan Mitra and Shyamapada Mukherjeee. In the rally, TMC supporters were seen sporting aprons or carrying placards with “We are all thieves” written on them. In February 2019, she sat on a 70-hour dharna at Esplanade in the heart of Calcutta, to protest an attempted raid by the CBI at the residence of then Kolkata Police Commissioner, Rajeev Kumar, in connection with the same scam.
Even last year, soon after returning to power, she rushed to the CBI’s office at the Central Government Office (CGO) complex in Salt Lake, after the agency arrested ministers Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, MLA Madan Mitra and former minister Sovan Chatterjee in the five-year-old Narada cash-for-favour sting operation case. She demanded before the CBI officers that she too would have to be arrested.
The party had a point. The agency hadn’t arrested Suvendu Adhikary, another accused in the same scam, after he had joined the BJP and become the leader of the Opposition in the state assembly. She left after a few hours, though.
But things were different this time. The moment the news broke on July 22 that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had recovered Rs 20 crore in cash from the residence of Chatterjee’s ‘close associate’ Arpita Mukherjee—the raid at Chatterjee’s residence was going on simultaneously—TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh tweeted that the party had nothing to do either with Mukherjee or the cash.
As it appears from Chatterjee’s arrest memo, ED officials, after arresting him at 1.35 am on July 23, asked Chatterjee if there was anyone he wanted to contact. Chatterjee had named the chief minister. The ED officials allowed him to call her four times—from 2 am to 9.30 am—but she did not take any of the calls. While being taken to a hospital for a mandatory health check-up upon arrest, Chatterjee told the media he had tried to contact the party chief but failed.
Gradually, news emerged that the ED found several property deeds in the name of Mukherjee, who did some modelling and acting in the past, in Chatterjee’s possession. In the evening, ministers Firhad Hakim, Arup Biswas, Chandrima Bhattacharya and spokesperson Kunal Ghosh told the media that the party had ‘full faith’ in the judicial system and would take action against Chatterjee if the court found him guilty. There was no word of support for Chatterjee, no suggestion that he might be a victim of political vendetta.
