Education reform — one of the major campaign planks of Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee in the historic West Bengal legislative assembly election of 2011 in which she swept aside the CPM (Communist Party of India)-led Left Front government that had ruled the state for three decades (1977-2011) — is at the heart of a political crisis confronting her in her second term in office.

Six years after the rout of the communists, little has changed except that now the youth wing of TMC is running amok on college and university campuses making desperate attempts to oust well-entrenched leftist faculty and student unions. And as if this wasn’t enough, on May 16, the TMC government’s education minister Partha Chatterjee announced in the legislative assembly that Bengali will become a compulsory subject in classes I-X of all 92,000 government and over 8,000 private schools — regardless of exam board affiliation — statewide in the new academic year 2017-18. 

This out-of-the-blue announcement of the TMC government has estranged businessmen and the substantial number of students from across the country who are enrolled in the state’s few nationally reputed boarding schools. Worse, it has enraged the Nepali speaking Gorkha majority in the hill areas of the state where the writ of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), a political party which dominates the semi-autonomous Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA, estb.2011) and has been demanding a separate state (Gorkhaland) for the Nepali majority since 2007.

With the famously intemperate Banerjee refusing to withdraw the government resolution and insisting on holding a full cabinet meeting — the first in 45 years — in Darjeeling on June 8, GJM leader Bimal Gurung staged a massive anti-government demonstration on the day. When a group of GJM leaders attempted to march to the venue of the cabinet meeting, they were lathi charged and tear gassed, prompting the party’s supporters to set several police jeeps on fire, injuring several security personnel. Following the outbreak of violence and arson, the TMC government requisitioned two Indian Army columns to maintain peace and security of the 45,000 tourists in Darjeeling. This sequence of events has prompted the GJM to renew its suspended call for a separate hill state of Gorkhaland to be carved out of West Bengal. 

Even as the TMC and GJM have locked horns on the issue of a separate state for the hill regions including Darjeeling, repeated agitations on this issue have taken a heavy toll on high-end vintage boarding schools sited in this region. Among them, St. Paul’s (estb.1825), St. Joseph’s North Point (1888), Darjeeling, Himali Boarding School (1978) and Goethal Memorial, Kurseong (1907). In 2013, when the GJM launched a similar agitation, they forced a shutdown of all schools for 42 days. This time as well the GJM, which is supported by all parties in the GTA region, has forced the shutdown of all 48 schools in the hills indefinitely, and on June 23 they allowed a 12-hour window for children to evacuate their dormitories and return home. 

“Fortunately this time the GJM order to shutdown all schools has coincided with the summer holidays. Therefore there is no disruption. Schools reopen on July 9, by when I hope this political issue will be sorted out. However it’s pertinent to note that this is the third total general strike — from which schools are not exempt. In the 1980s and in 2013 there were similar general strikes which disrupted children’s schooling. Now this latest agitation if not resolved soon, will severely dent the reputation of schools in the Darjeeling hills,” says Robindra Subba, director of the co-ed CISCE and CIE (UK)-affiliated Himali Boarding School, Kurseong which host 402 boarders including 200 girl students, who adds 35 percent of students who went home during the 2013 stir never returned. 

Drastic and overdue reform of West Bengal’s once envied education system may genuinely be a priority for chief minister Mamata Banerjee. But her obvious unawareness that the first recommendation for autonomous self-governance by the Nepali majority of the Darjeeling hill region was made to the Morley-Minto Commission in 1907, and that subsequently Nepali was acknowledged as the official language of this region in 1961 and also recognised as an official language of India in 1992, has triggered the law of unintended consequences for West Bengal’s floundering education system. The outcome is that the state’s education system is in deep trouble again.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)