When Cyclone Amphan unleashed its might on Calcutta in May 2020, it took away a great deal besides countless trees and livelihoods. Among other lost treasures was a pair of spectacles belonging to Mahatma Gandhi’s bronze statue at the crossing of Mayo Road and Dufferin Road. This summer, a new pair was requisitioned, but the one made by the public works department failed to fit. So even during the much-publicised Durga Puja carnival on Red Road on October 8, the father of the nation peered myopically from his perch. As indeed he continues to do at the scores of protesters who throng at his base every day till 5 pm (the ones who were unceremoniously relegated from the site so that the carnival did not have any blots about the goings-on in the state’s education department).
On Monday, passing by the site I thought of checking if the Mahatma, who had been in the eye of a storm after being depicted as an ‘asura’ at a Puja, was still deprived of his spectacles, and chanced upon a spectacle of a different kind.
A television reporter was practicing his mojo technique on the protesters, including specially-abled ones and a few children. They were holding up placards, shouting slogans and banging plastic water bottles on the ground. He zeroed in on two articulate protesters, Palash Mondal and Sulata Haldar, the latter holds a PhD degree and is endeavouring to be a school teacher. She comes to the venue regularly despite being physically challenged.
These successful School Service Commission empanelled candidates have been clamouring for what is rightfully theirs since 2016. They appeared for the state-level selection test for recruitment of teachers and when the results for Classes IX and X were declared in March 2018, they were among the successful candidates. That November, the results for Classes XI and XII were announced. And then the scam came to light as those who had not cleared the exam were recruited.
According to Mondal, “We sat on a dharna for the first time in 2019 in front of the Press Club. The chief minister and the then education minister, Partha Chatterjee, assured us that we would all be recruited. Then they gave the excuse of the Lok Sabha elections, saying that the model code of conduct prevented them from appointing us.”
A committee was announced, comprising five of the protesters and five members of the education department, with Chatterjee designated to look into their grievances. “The five protesters in the panel were given jobs in a bid to silence us,” Mondal said. The second phase of agitation was launched in January 2021 at Central Park in Salt Lake, opposite Bikash Bhavan, and continued for 187 days. “The SSC chairman, S.S. Sarkar, and the education minister, Bratya Basu, called a press conference and said we would get our jobs in 40 days,” he added.
In October last year, the protest moved to its present location. “We took permission from the court to continue our agitation indefinitely. We are 5,578 protesters and some of us come from the districts with children in the hope of a redressal,” said Mondal, who is among the eight representatives who met ruling party leaders in August. Once again, all they received were assurances.
Shiuli Thakur, another protester, lamented, “We have left our homes, sitting here with our children. No one is bothered.” Poetic justice usually beams on the wronged and those who relentlessly fight for their cause. These protests, continuing for 586 days, will hopefully elicit a benevolent verdict and help these distraught candidates get their jobs. Like the Mahatma’s missing glasses (will they ever be restored?) at the protest venue, the overriding myopia among the ruling dispensation appears symbolic of a malady in need of urgent succour.
