Hundreds of teachers, other school employees and ordinary people walked in anger through the heart of Calcutta on Thursday afternoon.
They were angry because:
- More than 25,000 people had lost their jobs, most of them widely deemed innocent.
- A corrupt system had claimed the jobs, the Supreme Court having last week cancelled the entire 2016 school recruitment process as “tainted beyond redemption”.
- The same system was now behaving brutally with the jobless.
The marchers readily defied the scorching sun, loath “to sit in our AC offices” when the police had, a day earlier, rained kicks and punches on aggrieved school staff at the district inspector’s office in Kasba.
Wednesday’s protesters — from among those sacked by the Supreme Court, which did not spare those not proven to have benefited from wrongdoing — had come to the Kasba office to demand the list of candidates termed “not specifically tainted” by the court.
Emotionally charged, some of them had scaled a closed gate and tried to storm the office. The reprisal was swift, harsh and widely seen as disproportionate, keeping in mind the protesters’ status as teachers and the trauma they were undergoing.
Thursday’s march, called by the Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum, drew many who were not teachers and were in no way affected personally by the Supreme Court decision. Most were particularly furious at Wednesday’s police action.
“It would be a sin to sit in our AC offices and just watch what is happening outside. Someone has to protest,” said Sanjib Kumar Chatterjee, a mathematics teacher at the Hooghly Mullickbati High School who was not affected by the Supreme Court order.
“How could the police beat up teachers with batons? Were they (the protesters) criminals, goons? An attack on one teacher is an attack on the entire fraternity. The police should apologise immediately.”
The three-hour march started from the Sealdah station compound around 12.30pm and ended at Esplanade, about 2km away. The protesters sat on Rani Rashmoni Avenue for almost an hour and left after 4.30pm.
Footage has emerged showing the police swinging their batons at unarmed teachers and non-teaching staff at the Kasba DI’s office. At least one uniformed policeman can be seen kicking a protester and grabbing another by the neck and pushing him.
Police commissioner Manoj Verma had on Wednesday said an inquiry had been initiated and a detailed report about the incident sought.
He had mentioned injuries to police and said there existed other kinds of footage that were not being shown or circulated.
Verma had appealed to the teachers and other school staff not to take the law into their own hands even if aggrieved.
Amit Ranjan Bhunia, one of the teachers beaten up at Kasba on Wednesday, participated in Thursday’s march from Sealdah.
“Even we are clueless —why were we beaten up like this? We went there just to get a few clarifications,” Bhunia said.
“We wanted the mirror image of the OMR sheets. We had also heard about an order to withhold the (due) salaries of the 2016 batch of teachers. We came to enquire but were not allowed in. We sat outside but the police asked us to leave. When we refused, the police charged at us.”
Many among the marchers wanted to know why the names of those “not specifically tainted” were not being published. “That would clarify a lot of things. But unfortunately, that list is not being published,” a teacher said.
Susobhan Chowdhury, a chemistry teacher and a father of one who has lost his job, broke down as he spoke to reporters on Rani Rashmoni Avenue.
“We have lost everything and now we are being beaten. We have nowhere to go, nothing to do,” he sobbed.
Among the marchers were homemakers, actors and young doctors like Debasish Halder, who had taken the lead in demanding justice for the junior doctor raped and murdered at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital last year.
“How could we sit and watch TV while the police inflicted such torture on teachers?” Halder said.
Some of the sacked school staff were scheduled to meet education minister Bratya Basu on Friday, but Wednesday’s police action has cast doubt over the meeting.
The Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum said it wanted to keep the door open for discussions with the state government so that the impasse could be resolved at the earliest.