Hours after her government faced a big setback in the teachers’ recruitment case, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said she does not accept the Supreme Court judgment personally, but her government will implement it and repeat the selection process. She also questioned if Opposition BJP and CPM wanted Bengal’s education system to collapse.

“As a citizen of this country, I have every right, and I cannot accept this judgment, with due respect to the judges. I am expressing my opinion from a humanitarian perspective. Don’t misinform or create confusion,” she told the media this afternoon. The government, she said, accepts the ruling and has already asked the School Service Commission to repeat the recruitment process.

The Supreme Court today upheld the Calcutta High Court order, cancelling the appointment of more than 25,000 teachers and non-teaching staff under the West Bengal School Service Commission. The Supreme Court said the entire selection process is “vitiated by manipulation and fraud” and its credibility and legitimacy “denuded”.

The bench of Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice PV Sanjay Kumar said that it saw no reason to interfere with the High Court order. The court said the appointments resulted from cheating and are thus fraudulent.

One key aspect of the judgment is that those appointed through fair means have also suffered like the tainted candidates.

Raking this up, Ms Banerjee asked why so many people must be punished for a few. “It’s not just 25,000 candidates, their families are impacted too,” she said.

Referring to the huge case recovery from the residence of Delhi High Court judge Yashwant Varma, she said, “If you recover money from a sitting judge’s home, he is only transferred. Then why were these candidates not transferred? The first judge to give this order is now a BJP MP. BJP and CPM have conspired to lead to this verdict,” she said.

Alleging a conspiracy to target Bengal, she asked if it was a crime to be born in the state. She questioned who would teach in classrooms if so many teachers lost their jobs. She said over 11,000 of the affected teachers taught in Class 9 and 10 and over 5,500 in Class 11 and 12. “Class 9-12 are very important classes, the gateway to higher education. Many of them are correcting answer sheets of board exams. Do BJP and CPM want the education system to collapse?” she said.