– Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Coaching class: multi-billion industry

A month after a mob of student members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) — the students’ wing of the BJP — and right-wing supporters rioted at Jadavpur University, another violent clash erupted inside the 40-acre campus of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) on September 27. Named in memoriam of legendary film director Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), SRFTI is the second national centre for cinema education in India, (after FTII, Pune, estb.1995). SRFTI was granted Deemed-to-be-University status on April 22, 2025.

The confrontation at SRFTI erupted after the Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat (ABGP) — an ABVP-linked consumer rights organisation — booked the campus auditorium for an “awareness” event. SRFTI students staged a protest against the administration for permitting an external, politically-affiliated body to commandeer academic space in the institute’s campus without informing the student body.

Tensions escalated when SRFTI students protested on campus with banners and placards to register their opposition to the ABGP event. This triggered a brutal physical confrontation and brick-pelting. Over 150 students sustained injuries of varying degree, with 30 students and two faculty members suffering severe trauma requiring hospitalisation. SRFTI students and faculty reported being hunted down and cornered in spaces like the library by “outsiders” who hurled verbal abuse, labeling them anti-national, urban Naxals, and jihadis. According to several SRFTI students, police stood by “as spectators” without taking action to protect them, despite reaching the campus soon after being informed of the violence.

On the other hand, ABGP activists counter-claimed that SRFTI students initiated the disruption by tearing down banners and disrespecting event posters. SRFTI’s newly appointed director Santosh Ajmera and the institute’s registrar have maintained total silence on the issue. Three FIRs have been filed, prompting the newly elected BJP government of West Bengal to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT), while students held silent protests and vigils on September 28 to demand accountability and campus autonomy.

Since the BJP government was sworn-in on May 4, ending 15 years of rule over West Bengal of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by stormy petrel chief minister Mamata Banerjee, campus clashes between ABVP and TMC and other students representative organisations have become frequent on Kolkata’s university campuses. For instance, at Scottish Church College student groups clashed on September 24 over the college management’s proposal to support a stage play celebrating Prime Minister Modi’s birthday on September 29. Some students resisted this proposal on the ground that it was “partisan political propaganda” in a secular, academic space.

To seasoned observers with long memories of Bengal’s academic landscape, there’s a disquieting deja vu of silencing dissent and stamping out free thinking in Kolkata’s premier academic spaces. During the 34 years rule (1977-2011) over Bengal of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government, students unions such as SFI affiliated with CPM, stamped out opposition and party apparatchiks also heavily infiltrated the faculty. After the Left Front government was routed by TMC in 2011, the party’s TMC Chhattra Parishad students wing did its utmost to oust well-entrenched CPM students unions from West Bengal’s academic campuses but with limited success. Now ABVP and supporting organisations are hell-bent on ousting CPM and TMC affiliated students unions.

“The agenda of all political parties is clear: to crush student autonomy, criminalise free speech, and systematically reshape academia into an echo chamber for majoritarian politics. Caught in the crossfire of this authoritarian encroachment, higher education in West Bengal is experiencing an unprecedented existential crisis, heavily compounded and left utterly defenseless by institutional rot, administrative failure, and systemic misrule under 15 years rule of the Trinamool Congress,” laments Partha Pratim Ray, associate professor of physics at Jadavpur University and president of the independent JUTA (Jadavpur University Teachers Association).

Now in a new initiative that has alarmed academics statewide, on September 10, the BJP government presented the West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) (Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the legislative assembly. The Bill empowers the government to transfer teaching and non-teaching employees across state universities.

This provision is strongly condemned as a direct assault on institutional autonomy because it empowers the government to transfer inconvenient and independent faculty to remote rural outbacks. It has created an environment of fear and anxiety that is likely to deter young academics from signing up with state government colleges and universities and an outflow to private universities, other states and overseas.

With the state’s ramshackle, under-staffed academies providing sub-standard education, youth are losing interest in higher education. Following three rounds of counselling through the Centralised Admission Portal (CAP), over 500,000 undergraduate seats out of roughly 900,000 offered across 459 state government colleges have remained vacant this year.

Respected academics in Kolkata fear that at a time when West Bengal is in desperate need of immediate investment to fill vacant faculty positions and institutional firewalls to cordon off higher education institutions from political interference, the new BJP government is hell-bent on following the tradition of government interference with Bengal’s higher ed institutions which are rapidly going downhill.