KOLKATA: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday told agitating school teachers that she was not opposed to agitations but there was a limit one could not cross.
“I am not against agitations. However, there is a Lakshman Rekha (red line). Just like I can’t stop anyone, nobody can stop me as well. Instead of agitating, they should fight their case in court. We will offer all the help. We are already doing it. We are not against them,” Banerjee told the media, referring to the alleged vandalism outside the West Bengal education department’s Salt Lake office on the night of May 15.
A few hundred government employees and visitors, including a pregnant woman, were trapped inside the building from 11am to 8.30pm on May 15. Several agitators were injured in baton charge and 19 policemen were hurt in stone pelting during the evacuation.
Banerjee’s statement came hours after the West Bengal police summoned three teachers identified from CCTV camera footage of the chaos. None of them appeared before the police officers probing the May 15 incident.
Chinmoy Mondal, a leader of the agitation, said they were consulting lawyers. “We will follow their instructions. Police should have summoned not three but all 25,752 school teachers and non-teaching staff from the 2016 panel whose appointments have been cancelled by the Supreme Court.”
The chief minister, who earlier appealed to the teachers to withdraw the agitation and ordered the state government to file a review petition before the top court, said she was aggrieved.
“There are more outsiders in the protest than the teachers. A pregnant woman was not allowed to go home and locked in for hours. A girl appearing for an exam jumped off the building in panic. She had to be hospitalized,” she said.
Mondal claimed the outsiders mentioned by the chief minister were relatives of the agitators.
“Our children, spouses and parents are all here to offer their solidarity. They are not outsiders. And, we have apologized for the inconvenience people faced. It was not our intention,” he said.
School teachers who attacked policemen and allegedly vandalised government property would be identified and booked, Jawed Shamim, additional director general of police (law and order) said on May 16.
The Supreme Court’s April 3 order in the bribe-for-job case has led to deadlock. The appointments were first cancelled by the Calcutta high court in 2023 and the state challenged the order at the Supreme Court.
On April 3, the division bench of Chief Justice of India scrapped the appointments of all 2016-batch school teachers and Group-C and D staff saying there was no way to segregate the tainted from the non-tainted.
On an appeal by the state, the top court said teachers who emerged unscathed in the investigations could continue in service until December 31. The court also directed the state to start a fresh recruitment process for them by May 31 and complete it in three months.
The May 15 blockade was called to press the demand that all non-tainted teachers must be allowed to continue in service without having to face the recruitment process again. Most agitators have refused to appear for a fresh selection test.
In May 2022, the Calcutta high court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the appointment of non-teaching staff (Group C and D) and teaching staff by WBSSC and West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021 when Partha Chatterjee was education minister. Many appointees allegedly paid bribes in the range of ₹5-15 lakh to get jobs after failing the selection tests.
The Enforcement Directorate, which started a parallel probe, arrested Chatterjee in July 2022. ED filed charges against him, ex-primary education board president and legislator Manik Bhattacharya and 52 others in January this year.