– Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Mamata Banerjee: court verdict lifeline

For the past several years, political pundits — including your correspondent — in West Bengal have been predicting that a series of education scandals that have erupted during the rule of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government — now serving its third consecutive term — is likely to prove its nemesis in the legislative assembly election scheduled to be held in April-May.

However a December 3 judgement of a Division Bench of the Calcutta high court setting aside an earlier single bench order that had cancelled the appointment of 32,000 primary school teachers because of alleged cheating, impersonation and faulty recruitment following a Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) held in 2014, has come as a lifeline to beleaguered Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  Earlier in May 2023, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay — who was subsequently given a BJP ticket and became a Lok Sabha MP — had cancelled the appointment of 32,000 of the 42,500 government school teachers who were appointed after they successfully wrote TET 2014.

Subsequently, the ruling TMC and Banerjee suffered another huge setback when last April the Supreme Court upheld a Calcutta high court verdict invalidating 25,753 teaching and non-teaching appointments made after another tainted TET 2016 was held.  In the circumstances, the December 3 Calcutta high court order setting aside Justice Gangopadhyay’s judgement relating to TET 2014, has evoked a collective sigh of relief within TMC and Banerjee. Invalidation of the appointment of almost 55,000 teachers in a state where government school teachers jobs are highly prized, would have been an unbearable blow to the electoral fortunes of the TMC which is already experiencing anti-incumbency headwinds.

Another fortuitous development that bodes well for TMC and Banerjee in the run-up to the legislative election next summer, is the outcome of the first-phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls published on December 9. It has quietly but decisively undercut the BJP’s core voter base in urban and semi-urban Bengal by striking off 5.8 million names from the electoral list, most of them of non-Bengali Hindus, reducing the number of the total electorate from 76 million to 70.08 million.

This is a setback for BJP which has emerged as TMC’s most formidable rival for the hearts and minds of the electorate because non-Bengali-speaking Hindu migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan are BJP’s most ardent supporters, and their votes are crucial especially in closely fought constituencies. Of the staggering 5.8 million names struck off the 2025 electoral rolls, a disproportionate number sport non-Bengali surnames — Das, Singh, Shaw, Yadav, Sharma, Ram. Moreover, most of them are predominantly male, often single migrants, from north Indian states — BJP’s most reliable support base in Bengal’s urban belts. Equally damaging for the BJP is that constituencies with high Muslim populations recorded fewer name deletions.

In recent years, BJP has emerged as TMC’s main antagonist in West Bengal by continuously alleging that Banerjee has been deliberately facilitating illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh to build a loyal vote bank. The first phase of SIR has dealt a serious blow to this carefully constructed narrative. “If the BJP’s allegations were even partially true, SIR would have confirmed it. One would have expected a disproportionately large number of Muslim voters — particularly those with Bengali Muslim surnames — to be deleted from the rolls. Instead, the opposite has happened,” says political commentator and cartoonist Ajitesh Kar.

This, however, does not mean the TMC has shaken off deep corruption allegations that have clouded its prospects in the imminent legislative election. Since 2015, the end of its first term in office after Banerjee famously, almost single-handedly built TMC and ended 34 years of continuous rule (1977-2011) of the Left Front government led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), corruption and mismanagement scandals within the education sector, especially in recruitment of teachers for the state’s 84,000 government and aided schools have rocked West Bengal. In a state that has traditionally valued good quality education, memories of the Supreme Court judgement of April 3, 2025, that nullified the appointment of 25,735 secondary and higher-secondary teachers recruited by the state government in 2016 because of testing and recruitment malpractice, are green.

Under Trinamool Congress rule, Bengal’s education system has been debilitated by corruption, administrative paralysis and judicial scrutiny. The fallout is stark: West Bengal has the country’s highest secondary school dropout rate at 18.75 percent and 2.8 lakh fewer students have signed up to write secondary exams this year. Moreover, West Bengal hosts 3,812 of India’s 8,000 zero-enrolment schools of 2024-25. In a state already burdened by continuous capital flight and de-industrialisation during prolonged rule of the Left government, repeated education scandals have aggravated graduate unemployment.

With the 2026 assembly elections looming, West Bengal’s electorate that accords high premium to education, is forced into a false binary between political parties focused on point-scoring than on rebuilding schools, restoring trust and delivering jobs. Caught between these nihilistic narratives, the electorate is hapless, compelled to make a choice between bad and worse.