Judge-turned-BJP MP Abhijit Gangopadhyay on Tuesday prescribed a way to differentiate the “deserving candidates” from the “undeserving” in the school recruitment case.
Gangopadhyay’s comments drew a retort from state education minister
Bratya Basu, who said he spoke like a politician when he was a judge and is talking like a judge now when he is a politician.
The former Calcutta High Court judge, who quit his robes to become a BJP Lok Sabha candidate from Tamluk in 2024, met a representation from the Sangrami Jautha Mancha — an umbrella outfit of protesting state employees — at his home.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, he said: “It is possible to come out with a list of deserving and undeserving... The CBI has recovered a mother disk from Haryana.... The CBI has tallied it.... The SSC should consider it as the correct list... and publish the same. If there are 25 lakh candidates, publish the entire list. Then sit with people, if you agree to set up a committee, then sit with its members. From there, separate the deserving from the undeserving.”
He added: “Then, file a review application in the Supreme Court. Tell the court that these are the undeserving candidates; do whatever you like with them. But these are the deserving candidates. Please do not punish them.”
The school service commission (SSC) appointed an agency to scan and evaluate the OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets of the 2016 state-level selection test. The CBI, which was probing the recruitment scam, searched the Ghaziabad office of the agency and retrieved a hard disk apparently containing the scanned mirror images of the original OMR sheets.
The SSC had destroyed the original OMR sheets.
Based on that hard disk, the CBI had furnished a report in Calcutta High Court, alleging that the OMR sheets of over 5,000 candidates had been fudged.
Justice Gangopadhyay, who was hearing the case, had ordered the CBI probe in February 2022.
On Tuesday, responding to the former judge’s comments, minister Basu said: “When he was a judge, he would talk like a politician. He would talk like Opposition parties that ‘I will scrap the panel, everything is fake, the grain cannot be separated from the stones’. Now that he is a parliamentarian, a politician, he is talking like a judge.”
“He is saying that the distinction (between deserving and undeserving) should be done, a committee should be set up, it should be headed by a retired judge or someone else... I had seen in some earlier interview that he used to love theatre and he aspired
to become a theatre actor. As a dedicated student of theatre, I can say that if he ever wanted to become an actor, he should have known that an ideal actor understands which part is reserved for whom,” said Basu.
Since April 3, when the Supreme Court cancelled the appointments of 25,773 teaching and non-teaching staff, saying the entire recruitment process had been vitiated, the former judge has been saying that the distinction between “undeserving and deserving candidates” was possible.
He has urged chief minister Mamata Banerjee to rise above politics and set up a committee to do that job, volunteering to be a part of the panel.