KOLKATA: ‘It is shocking that at the level of the Cabinet of the state government, decision is taken to protect employment obtained fraudulently.’
Even as the Calcutta High Court judgement scrapping 26,000 appointments in government schools in West Bengal on grounds of gross irregularities in the selection process has become a political issue, with both the BJP and the Trinamool Congress in Bengal using it to appeal for votes, the judgement is a “damning indictment of the functioning of the Mamata Banerjee government”, say political observers.
On Monday, the Division Bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Md. Shabbar Rashidi delivered a 282-page judgement that laid bare the various acts of omission and commission of the West Bengal School Service Commission, under the State Education Department.
“The court declared the entire School Service Commission recruitment panel of 2016 ‘null and void,’ as a result of which all appointments from 9th to 12th and groups C and D, where irregularities were found, stood cancelled,” said Firdous Samim, the High Court advocate who came into the limelight for representing many candidates who complained of being cheated out of their jobs.
Senior counsel and CPM leader Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya says, “There is no doubt that the scam is of gigantic proportions. It is the biggest of its kind during the TMC rule of 11 years. It is a full-fledged organised scam which goes down to the bottom to the villages from where ineligible candidates who were willing to pay a hefty sum to the Trinamool touts were recruited.”
Former Additional Director of CBI, Upen Biswas, who first brought out the news of the scam in the public domain, says: “Trinamool means grassroots. True to its name, there was an elaborate network of people, all of them Trinamool local leaders and their associates, spread across the state, who would take money from ineligible young aspirants, and pass on the money to the upper rungs. It was a corporate structure, going all the way to the then Education Minister Partha Chattopadhyay. That is why the ED was able to unearth mountains of cash and jewellery from the apartments of his close associate Arpita Mukherjee.”
“The judgement has revealed how ineligible candidates were appointed,” explains Samim.
The ball started rolling when on writ petitions filed by some candidates who appeared in SLST-2016, but did not get jobs, a single bench presided by Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay ordered a CBI investigation into alleged irregularities in the recruitment process.
The state government appealed to the Supreme Court against the order. However, the Supreme Court on November 9, 2023, requested the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court to constitute a division bench to hear all the petitions and appeals pertaining to the recruitment process through SLST-2016 for early adjudication. It also directed the CBI to complete its investigation and submit its report to the High Court’s Division Bench within two months.
Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay is now contesting the Tamluk Lok Sabha seat as a BJP candidate.
Predictably, Mamata Banerjee and her nephew and party number two Abhishek Banerjee are taking pains to highlight this switchover and are alleging that BJP masterminded the High Court decision.
“This is all nonsense,” says former Justice Gangopadhyay.
“The CBI found that many people who submitted blank OMR sheets got good marks. There was widespread manipulation of the OMR sheets. The marks of many who scored poorly, went up dramatically. For example, one candidate got 2 but was shown as having scored 53. OMR sheets were destroyed. Even the agency which was to organise the recruitment process was appointed improperly. The entire recruitment process was vitiated only to raise funds for the Trinamool Congress,” says Gangopadhyay.
According to the High Court judgement, neither the SSC nor the state government gave authentic figures of eligible and ineligible candidates. Hence, the Court said, it was unable to separate “the wheat from the chaff” and had to scrap the entire process altogether.
However, state SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar said: “We submitted before the court lists of candidates where anomalies in recruitment were found. These lists were based on two specific irregularities in recruitment, namely Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheet manipulation and rank jumps. The total number of such candidates for Groups C and D and teachers for Classes 9-10 and 11-12 was around 5,300.”
The claim came after the High Court Special Bench scrapped all 25,753 appointments. The court also directed that a section of those recruits will have to return salaries drawn by them along with 12% per annum interest. In its judgement, the court said that it chose to cancel the entire appointment panel since it became impossible to separate the grain from the chaff on account of non-cooperation from the SSC and the Bengal government in providing the names of those who were illegally recruited.
The High Court also ordered a CBI investigation into the state Cabinet decision to create supernumerary posts to accommodate the illegal appointees.
Though Mamata Banerjee, Abhishek Banerjee and other party leaders are trying to paint the BJP as the prime instigator for the mass job cancellation, this particular part of the order can emerge as a huge problem for the Mamata Banerjee government in future, say political observers.
“The High Court judgement says ‘It is shocking that, at the level of the Cabinet of the state government, decision is taken to protect employment obtained fraudulently in a selection process conducted by SSC for state funded schools’,” says Bikash Bhattacharya. “If the CBI carries out its investigation properly, Mamata and her entire Cabinet will be in jail,” he told The Sunday Guardian.
The BJP’s Leader of the Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari, said: “We demand that all the ministers who agreed to this illegal proposal in the Cabinet meeting held on May 5, 2022, should be arrested. Mark my word, Mamata’s cronies may have to spend the rest of their lives in jail.”