Last month the headmaster of Jadavpur Vidyapith, a prominent school in Kolkata, was assaulted by a group of hooligans led by the local Trinamul Congress (TC) councilor in the school. Today another group of hooligans assaulted the principal and other teachers of Raigunj College, North Bengal in the college campus in broad daylight. As the live footage of the assault on the teachers were telecast by vernacular channels, city’s civil society protested in anger.
This time the attack was led by the district TC president Tilak Chowdhury who was seen leading the crowd with party flags in hands. Later the humiliated and hapless principal Dilip De Sarkar accused the TC for the assault on him and his colleagues and said that in the prevailing situation he had been forced to close down the college sine die. Also, he conveyed his decision to the vice Chancellor of North Bengal University of resigning from the post of principal. Debashish Biswas, a teacher of the college also resigned protesting the act of vandalism by the ruling party supporters. Prof. Biswas later told media that all his life he had been a die hard supporter of anti-Left politics. “But is this the change we asked for?” Biswas commented.
Ever since Mamata Banerjee came to power, her party supporters have started storming the schools and colleges aiming at capturing the students and non-teaching employees unions and terrorizing the teachers who are not showing enough enthusiasm for the TC.
In Kolkata the anger of the civil society was voiced by noted author like Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, noted stage personality Koushik Sen and some others. Debkumar Mukherjee, secretary of the principals’ council, North Bengal University also joined the protest by condemning the attack on the teachers. But the ruling party leaders were unrepentant. Firhad Hakim, Madan Mitra and Goutam Deb, all TC leaders and ministers of Mamata Banerjee government tried to defend the act of vandalism saying that this could be handiwork of outsiders to malign the party. But Sugato Basu, professor of Harvard University and chairman of the mentor group for Presidency University, condemned this act of vandalism and commented that the politicians should stop meddling into college matters immediately. The higher education minister Bratya Basu was called to Raj Bhavan by the Governor M K Narayan-who is ex-officio chancellor of all the state universities- to discuss a pending education bill. Though after coming out from Raj Bhavan Bratya Basu did not divulge the content of his discussion with the chancellor, it is indicated that he had to face questions from Narayan Later on Bratya Basu issued a statement condemning this incident and demanded that the police should arrest those were responsible for this.
According to the principal of Raigunge College today was scheduled for filing nomination papers for the upcoming student council election. But a section of students along with TC supporters who are outsiders came in and started assaulting the teachers.
But the police was seen watching this idly. A number of people also criticized the police inaction and demanded action should be taken against them.