Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Barely ten months after the brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata, yet another education institution gang rape atrocity — this time of a first‑year law student of South Calcutta Law College, allegedly by a former student leader of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party — has shaken the tottering TMC government, now in its third consecutive five-year term in office — and reeling under a spate of teacher recruitment scandals.

For TMC and its stormy petrel chief minister Mamata Banerjee, this latest scandal which has attracted banner headlines countrywide couldn’t have come at a worse time. The state is scheduled to go to the polls within the next 12 months. 

Throughout the past 14 years since the TMC government was swept to power in West Bengal (pop.102 million) in 2011, ending 34 years of continuous rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) — an era during which West Bengal was de-industrialised and its higher education institutions infiltrated by party apparatchiks — the state has experienced repeated K-12 teacher recruitment and appointment scandals for its 84,000 government schools.

Government school-teachers’ jobs with their relatively high salaries determined by Central government Pay Commissions, are highly prized in the state devastated by continuous capital flight, de-industrialisation and resulting high unemployment.

However, a former education minister of the TMC government is in jail following discovery of a Rs.100-crore cash hoard in his flat, reportedly collected as bribes for recruiting and appointing under-qualified teachers. Following repeated stay-orders issued by the Calcutta high court of the all-important TET (Teacher Eligibility Test) for exam paper leakages and assessment, on April 3, the Supreme Court scrapped the appointment of 25,735 secondary and higher secondary school teachers because “the entire recruitment process is irreparably tainted and invalid”. Subsequently as reported on this page last month, the TMC government’s latest bloomer in education is its failure to resolve the issue of reservations for OBCs (Other Backward Classes/Castes) in government-run higher education institutions.

People across West Bengal, which has a rich tradition of education leadership respected and treasured statewide, especially by the influential bhadralok (refined middle class) which has survived communist efforts stretching over half a century to root them out, are becoming increasingly aware that TMC’s worst scandals are in the education sector followed by crimes against women citizens. The RG Kar Hospital atrocity of last August was committed against a woman student. This has been followed by the gang rape of a woman student of South Calcutta Law College last month. Moreover in the latest gruesome incident, the prime accused is Monojit Mishra, a former student of the college and former president of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP), the student wing of TMC. 

“The fact that a repeat offender like Monojit Mishra continued to wield unchecked power despite multiple complaints reflects not just administrative failure, but the terrifying power of TMCP on campuses. These repeated horrors speak volumes about a government that has failed to safeguard students, allowing party interests to override law, accountability and basic human decency,” says Swapan Mandal, General Secretary of the Bengal Teachers and Employees Association (BTEA).

Within West Bengal’s respected intelligentsia, there is widespread dismay and disillusionment that the state’s once respected public K-12 school system, in which over 50,000 sanctioned teachers’ posts are vacant because of court stay orders and TET cancellation, has been severely damaged if not wrecked. An estimated 8,000 schools have been shut down even as the TMC government’s mishandling of the Covid pandemic during which all schools statewide were closed for 99 weeks, forced 8 million students out of primary schools.

Comments Biswanath Chakra-borty, professor of political science, Rabindra Bharati University, Shantiniketan, established by the state government in 1962 to commemorate the birth centenary of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore: “These incidents have exposed a governance machinery that is not just incompetent but maliciously harmful. Add to this, the freeze on recruitment of college professors, leaving classrooms understaffed, and stranglehold of political forces on university campuses, where party loyalists override merit, harass students, and silence dissent. What Bengal is witnessing is not misgovernance — it is a deliberate dismantling of public education in the state, where political gain is pursued at the cost of an entire generation’s future.”

With West Bengal’s legislative assembly elections less than a year away, Mamata Banerjee’s prospects of being re-elected for a record fourth consecutive term are dimming by the day.

Also Read: West Bengal starts verifying applications of untainted teachers for reinstatement