Friday, 25 April 2025
Friday, 25 April 2025
The city streets vacated by the junior doctors this January have been taken over by the government schoolteachers and non-teaching staff enraged after the loss of their jobs and the lathis, kicks and punches that rained on them during Wednesday’s protest at the district inspector’s office in Kasba.
After the Kolkata Police started a suo motu case against the protesters charged with vandalism, the jobseekers have hit the streets. Since Wednesday night, a group of protesters squatted outside the school service commission office Acharya Bhawan in Salt Lake.
BJP MP and former Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Ganguly and former Rajya Sabha MP Roopa Ganguly met the protesters at the venue in the morning.
A protest march is scheduled for this afternoon from Sealdah to Rani Rashmoni Road.
“Everything has happened on the instructions of the chief minister. It won’t be surprising if the police attack here as well. The government has no interest in solving the crisis,” said the Tamluk MP Ganguly.
After meeting the SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar Wednesday afternoon Ganguly set a deadline till Friday afternoon to make public the mirror image of the OMR sheets submitted by the aspiring candidates.
The state-level selection test took place after the announcement for vacancies was made in 2016.
“I will monitor the website to see what the SSC is actually doing,” he said.
Later talking to The Telegraph Online, the actor-politician Roopa Ganguly said the chief minister should immediately find a solution in consultation with the state bureaucrats.
“I went there on humanitarian grounds, not politics. Lives are at stake here,” she said, adding, "This is the time for each and every Trinamool worker to help Mamata Banerjee in identifying the “tainted” candidates. Somebody must have recommended their names to the former education minister or others accused in the scam. Those middle-men need to be identified. Bengal’s education system and the future of our children depends on how swiftly the system is cleansed.”
The protesting teachers were assaulted on reaching the DI’s office where they went to submit a memorandum demanding their jobs be handed back to them Wednesday.
The Kolkata Police has ordered an inquiry into what provoked the cops to charge at the protesting teachers. According to Lalbazar sources, one of the cops in uniform seen kicking a protester at the DI office has been asked to explain his action.
The city police commissioner Manoj Verma had said the police had to resort to mild lathi-charge to keep the situation under control.
The police also issued a denial on its official X handle on the allegations that the videos it had shared were not linked to the Kasba protest.
“Some unscrupulous individuals are spreading misinformation that videos posted by Kolkata Police do not pertain to yesterday’s incident,” Kolkata Police wrote.
“The clips were merged for representation in a single video. Separate clips are below, including one showing a protester calling to ‘burn down the place with petrol.’ Faced with such unrelenting aggressive behaviour, Kolkata Police was compelled to use mild force in self-defense and disperse the unruly mob.”
A week ago, a division bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice of India Sanjeev Khanna had scrapped the entire panel selected in the 2106 SLST, calling the selection process “vitiated and tainted” as it upheld the Calcutta high court’s verdict from last year which had cancelled the appointments.
