Speak up, Poets

You are a poet, don’t be silent, lives are lost under cover of silence.
Speak up, read a couple of lines, read us verses, keep talking to us.

— Mir Taqi Mir
(translated by Ranjit Hoskote)

On April 3, 2025, the Supreme Court upheld an earlier verdict of the Calcutta High Court and invalidated 25,752 appointments of teaching and non-teaching staff made by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) in 2016 through a regional level selection test. The SSC scam, till date, is West Bengal’s biggest recruitment scam, already resulting in the arrest of several prominent politicians including the former Education Minister Partha Chatterjee and influential Trinamool MLA Manik Bhattacharya.

The court invalidated the appointments by firmly stating that the entire selection process was “vitiated and tainted beyond resolution.” The court has also stated that  the state government tried to “cover up” the irregularities in recruitment by destroying the optical mark recognition (OMR) answer sheets, and not keeping a backup. Neither the government nor the school service commission has ever produced any list of untainted candidates before the court. This has created the suspicion that even the government  authorities suspect that even among the so-called untainted candidates there could be tainted ones as well. Such hesitancy by the WBSSC has made the court declare that the court is “convinced that the entire selection process was intentionally compromised due to the illegalities involved.”

As a natural consequence of this verdict, protests erupted in Bengal. Political parties, mass organisations and teachers’ associations protested against the scam and the government’s attempts to cover up the irregularities. Interestingly, Trinamool Congress also protested against the verdict of the Supreme Court arguing that the lawyers, led by CPI(M) leader Bikashranjan Bhattacharya, who have fought the case for the deprived teachers in the High Court and the Supreme Court should not have file the petition challenging the recruitment process at all! Nothing indeed could be funnier than this. The Chief Minister held a meeting with the so-called untainted candidates in Netaji Indore Stadium on 7 April 2025 and failed to give any concrete solution to the problem and instead asked the teachers to give voluntary service to the schools. After this meeting, when the teachers protested in front of different DI officers in the state, they were brutally lathicharged and one of them was even kicked by a police officer.

What is interesting in this context is the stance of the poets of Bengal. Most of the poets who are invited to different government festivals and poetry readings have remained silent and even participated in a Little Magazine Fair and Literature Festival that was going on around that time. Some, of course, protested and did not participate in the fair. Very few participated in the fair and protested against the government atrocities. A poet, astonishingly, has even indirectly supported the lathicharge and the kick!

It seems that the poets have now become the most cheap commodity in Bengal. A cheque of Rs 2000 and a beautifully decorated bag can purchase them.

The poets of West Bengal should remember the verse quoted as the epigraph to this piece written by Mir almost 300 years ago.

They should speak up, and remember that they should look like seers and not beggars.

Angshuman Kar

April 2025