The bubble was waiting to burst.
On 3rd April 2025, the Supreme Court declared that the recruitment of schoolteachers through the State Level Selection Test of 2016 was a large-scale fraud that tainted the entire process and subsequently made repair of the damage unworkable and the “credibility and legitimacy of the selection…denuded”.
The striking down of the appointment of nearly 26,000 teachers and staff due to the inability of the state to determine who was recruited without paying bribes as opposed to those who got jobs through blatantly unfair means has, for obvious reasons, shaken the edifice of both the state and society.
In a country like India, corruption is something that citizens encounter, negotiate and accept as a part of their everyday living. The nonchalance of state agents and their involvement in acts of everyday criminality is also something that has now become a part of the normative texture of the social world that we inhabit.
From paying bribes to sundry petty state agents to higher officials in the bureaucracy, their political masters, ministers, judges and whoever can be compromised is a story that every household can vouch for as part of their lived experience as a citizen of India.
Indeed, conversations in the households may revolve around the great surprise and joy of having completed a public transaction without greasing palms! What should have been a pathology is taken to be acceptable and normal, and what should have been normal becomes the talk of the town.
This is our public culture, and throw in the hubris of the officialdom with the accompanying architecture of power, that essentially hollows out the citizen from being a rights-bearing person, one may wonder why we should be bothered by yet another scam.
Firstly, this is a systemic fraud, a scam that has its roots in the very offices of the state. We are not dealing here with private citizens who hold no office of the state but with individuals who are ministers, nominated government appointees and heads of statutory bodies.
Corruption at this level is an assault against the system from within. This is a crisis which is another episode in a long series of events that has further assaulted the vestiges of good governance. The state, run through an elected government, is supposed to uphold the idea of fairness and must be seen as a space which rises above the conflicting interests of the people. That is its only source of legitimacy. Legitimacy, in turn, gives the power of the state the authority to be an allocator of values.
This scam and many others of this kind keep on bringing to our attention the need for greater ethical standards in public life. Failing this test of public morality makes the government weak and compromises its status as an organisation that is an ‘eminent domain’. When the state loses the authority that ‘eminent domain’ bestows, it is left with physical power only. That is a huge loss to the state and one that strikes at the very heart of citizenry who are to provide habitual obedience.
Secondly, it is obvious to those who follow public affairs in West Bengal that the sale of jobs in the school sector took place over a long period. Anyone with some information of the precarious job situation in Bengal, knew that available jobs were being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The silence of those who belong to the so-called ‘civil society’ on this is a matter of grave concern. The failure to articulate anxieties over such a scandalous situation and the pretension that all is good and business as usual must ring alarm bells for those who preach the politics of liberal democracy.
A state with a mute ‘civil society’ is a recipe for disaster, and we are witnessing the coming together of the commission of evil and the omission of dissent and debate. For this, of course, we must note the arrival and consolidation of a compliant media in the last few decades.
The task of the ‘new media’ is mainly to articulate propaganda, flood the news and information highway with irrelevant and shallow news content and choke the few serious media channels out of the public’s view.
The scam that we are witnessing is not an accident, nor is it the handiwork of a few evil people. This is a parallel structure that has slowly developed a cynical system where patronage, the lure of lucre, and the adulation of the undeserving have created a hubris which, in effect, says that we can get away with almost anything since we enjoy a majority in the Assembly.
Thirdly, this scam must not be seen only from the point of view of the ethically challenged political agents, the corrupt bureaucrats and the beneficiaries. Let us pause and think about this from the perspective of the school student. A student usually thinks of her teacher as one who must be respected. The teacher is, for the student, a figure of great trust, a repository of wisdom and a person to reach out to in times of crisis.
For as Oliver Goldsmith wrote, ‘still they gazed and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew’. This wonder is a wonder of joy, of great respect, of love and trust. Anyone who has ever taught has experienced all of these. These are ingredients by which the teacher presents herself in class, legitimises her presence in the eyes of her students and embarks on a journey with her students that would last for a lifetime.
Now, imagine a situation where the student is made aware of the scam. Information, especially of this kind, is never at a premium. The student loses the awe of the teacher and equates her with a person who has subverted basic morality and now lives a life of lies.
Remember, the school is the first institution of socialisation where the student learns that a lie is negatively sanctioned and a good deed is rewarded, and that the teacher is the arbiter in her small world of the many complexities that she discovers daily.
What the scam has done is that it has shattered the sacred bond of the teacher and the student, destroyed the last vestiges of the prestige that the schoolteacher enjoyed and brought down teacher esteem in a vicious swipe of criminal mediocrity.
Every teacher from now on, as she enters the classroom, would be subject to doubt from persons too young to comprehend the complexities of state and politics. The adults have been shaking their world for a long time, playing with their lives, and now they have destroyed the school. And with it their future, their dreams and ambitions.
This is a huge, gargantuan loss that is not entirely enumerable but real and impactful in ways that only the future may say. But that it has added yet another nail in the coffin of publicly funded education is beyond doubt.
It is for this reason, if not for any other, that we should be worried and see the scam as not another routine act of corruption that happens in our country. Any assault on the public education system is an assault on the future of those who cannot escape to the environs of posh corporate schools and must depend on the state for the education of their children.
No decree or judgment can repair this injustice, for it is a class war, a battle of discrimination and a result of the deliberate and callous contempt for the common good. The corruption affects those institutions that provide mobility to those who cannot buy an education from the market, creating a segregation, an apartheid of learning where the ultimate sufferers are the young and the vulnerable students.
So, while we mourn the loss of jobs that this scam has brought about, let us not forget the students, the purported recipients of schooling and the future of our society and the nation and the depredations that they are about to encounter.
Surajit C Mukhopadhyay is a sociologist and a senior academic based in Kolkata. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.