Opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari on Monday said Mamata Banerjee was the biggest link in the alleged School Service Commission recruitment scam in Bengal as the BJP turned the occasion of the Teachers’ Day into a weapon to attack the Trinamul Congress government with.

Adhikari said the chief minister had been trying to put the blame of the alleged teachers’ recruitment scam on Partha Chatterjee, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate.

“The former education minister (Chatterjee) was the de facto number 2 in her (Mamata’s) cabinet. He was the secretary general of her party.… Partha and Keshto are small fries. She is the biggest link (in these scams),” Adhikari said.

Keshto is the nickname of Trinamul’s Birbhum district chief Anubrata Mondal who had been arrested by the CBI for alleged links in cattle smuggling.The chief minister on Monday addressed a gathering in Calcutta on the occasion of the Teachers’ Day and said her government was ready to hire 89,000 teachers, but cases in the court prevented such an exercise.

Several BJP leaders observed the Teachers’ Day with SSC aspirants whose dharna at the Gandhi statue in Calcutta completed 540 days on Monday. Pankaj Roy, the co-convenor of the BJP’s intellectual cell, Sharmistha Bhattacharya, the convenor of the intellectual cell of the party’s women’s wing, Rudranil Ghosh, the convenor of the cultural cell, and party leaders Bimal Sankar Nanda and Samapti Roy, met the agitators.

CPM central committee member Shamik Lahiri came down heavily on the government for celebrating the Teachers’ day.

“Do they (the state government) have any right to observe the Teachers’ Day? They have ruined the education system of the entire state. It is because of them that teacher aspirants have been sitting on streets for more than 500 days. They have no right to observe this day,” said Lahiri.

Reacting to Mamata’s allegation of malpractices in recruitments during the Left Front regime, Lahiri said when his party was in power, the merit lists for every recruitment used to be uploaded on the website.“During the Left rule, the list of appointments was shared publicly. During the Trinamul rule, however, the information was shared via text messages. Why is this lack of transparency? This is for jobs to be sold for money,” he said, adding that Mamata was running an entirely corrupt administration. “She is directly involved in this corruption.”Told that Mamata had shared her thoughts on integrity in life at the government’s Teachers’ Day programme, CPM MP Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya said: “If she is talking of integrity, then integrity must have died.”