A non-governmental organisation has served a legal notice to Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for alleged contempt of court through derogatory remarks against the Supreme Court after it passed a judgment in the School Service Recruitment scam cancelling entire 2016 panel of selected candidates including teachers and non-teaching staff citing “tainted” selection process. The notice was issued by Advocate S Dutta on behalf of an NGO Aatmdeep on Thursday.
In its order, the Bench of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna of the Supreme Court upheld the Calcutta High Court’s order cancelling the entire panel of 25,752 appointees after neither the Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment nor the State Education Department succeeded in identifying ineligible candidates who had secured their jobs through illegal means. Earlier the SSC had identified about 5,000 illegal appointments bypassing eligible candidates but did not rule out more such appointees as the entire OMR sheet had been destroyed.
Incidentally a similar case involving about 62,000 primary school teachers is awaiting judgment.
The remarks were made by the Chief Minister during a meeting of sacked school staff at the Netaji Indoor Stadium. The meeting took place on April 8.
In her speech Mamata Banerjee — who has been under severe attack from the Opposition for running a corrupt government had seen a number of her senior leaders including ministers, MPs and MLAs going to jail in a plethora of scams — Banerjee publicly questioned the Court’s conduct in passing of the judgment.
“I know I can go to jail … I am not afraid of that. But I don’t care. I am ready to go to jail but… who has the right to take anyone’s job? No one,” Banerjee said adding she had a number of contingency plans to substitute the Supreme Court order and save the jobs of the sacked staff.
“Our Plan A is ready, B is ready, C is ready, D is ready and E is ready,” she said. Incidentally another senior TMC leader and an MP from the North 24 Parganas Partha Bhowmik too had made some derogatory remarks.
In the notice, the Chief Minister has been asked to apologise for her conduct or face legal action and contempt proceedings under Article 129 of the Constitution and the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971.
The contempt notice comes at a time when the State Integrated Salary Management System portal still showed the names of the job losers. When asked as to whether non-compliance of the Supreme Court order amounted to contempt of court State Education Minister Bratya Basu said that the Government had already filed a petition seeking clarifications from the Apex Court on its order. “We will file a review petition and are awaiting the opinion of the legal experts,” he said.
