– Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Former CM Banerjee: prophecy foretold

The unprecedented victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal’s legislative election hasn’t come as a surprise. It is the logical culmination of a long-brewing crisis in the state’s education system — a crisis repeatedly flagged by EducationWorld and described as the Achilles’ heel of the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) in this column last month.

When the TMC led by Banerjee ended 34 years (1977-2011) of continuous misrule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government which de-industrialised West Bengal and ruined the state’s education institutions by packing them with under-qualified party apparatchiks, the general expectation was that she would accord high priority to restore them to their former glory. But a series of school teacher recruitment scams, politicisation of campuses, and fiscal neglect belied these expectations.

The steady decline of the state government funded and administered Jadavpur University (JU) — the pride of Bengal — is symbolic of the gradual decline of West Bengal’s prized higher education system. Once ranked among India’s premier public universities, JU has descended into administrative chaos in recent years. A prolonged vice chancellor vacancy following the retirement of Prof. Suranjan Das in 2023 was exacerbated by a power struggle between the TMC government and the Governor, ex officio chancellor of all 38 universities statewide. This face-off paralysed governance, stalled academic processes, delayed faculty salaries and has eroded the nationwide reputation and credibility of JU. On April 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi who campaigned extensively in West Bengal, publicly criticised JU as a “den of anarchy and anti-national activity”.

JU’s numbers are telling. State funding has consistently fallen far short of requirements, forcing desperate appeals to alumni to maintain basic operations. Simultaneously, nearly half of non-teaching posts and over a third of faculty positions are vacant. The consequences of this neglect are declining student applications in core disciplines; vacant engineering seats in a state once known for technical excellence, research disruption and scholar distress due to halted funding streams.

While the BJP-led Centre cannot be absolved — particularly regarding funding disputes and the denial of ‘Institute of Eminence’ status — the TMC government’s day-to-day stewardship is primarily to blame for the sad decline of JU, bearing in mind that it is a state government-funded and managed higher education institution. Recurrent teacher recruitment scams, widely publicised — a senior minister in charge of the education portfolio is awaiting trial after a mountain of currency notes were found in the flat of his mistress — and deeply resented, struck at the heart of middle-class aspirations. Teaching jobs — once symbols of merit and stability — became synonymous with corruption.

“To a substantial extent, BJP’s sweeping victory in the recently concluded legislative assembly election is the outcome of TMC’s systemic neglect of Bengal’s education and intellectual foundations. TMC allowed recurrent teacher recruitment scandals to become a moral assault on the state’s heritage, effectively negating academic excellence by administrative paralysis. This callousness — evidenced by vacant leadership positions in higher education and the swelling unemployment crisis — left Bengal’s youth with no alternative but to seek a change of government. Ultimately, TMC was routed because it prioritised populist rhetoric over development and integrity of our schools and universities,” says Prof. Pabitra Sarkar, former Vice Chancellor of the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, founded in 1962 to mark the birth centenary of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Since the dawn of the new millennium thanks in part to the launch of EducationWorld driven by the mission to accord highest priority to education to develop India’s abundant human resource, there’s intense awareness that education is the sole passport for upward mobility of the great mass of citizens toiling at the bottom of the country’s iniquitous social order. The media’s relentless exposure of the numerous scams and scandals in education under Mamata Banerjee’s watch — and her conspicuous failure to reform the education system — proved the TMC’s undoing. In a state with a glorious tradition of scholarship and erudition, the slow, visible decay of education institutions sealed her fate.

For other politicians who persist in neglecting education of the world’s largest child and youth population, the writing is on the wall: when education systems collapse under the weight of corruption and neglect, adverse political outcomes are inevitable. West Bengal’s 2026 verdict is a warning.