Opinion: West Bengal’s universities face a new test under Suvendu Adhikari

West Bengal’s classrooms were built by reformers who trained people to question. A generation taught to see questioning as disloyalty by teachers afraid of transfer will not argue with orthodoxy. It will kneel to it

By Dr Tuhinsubhra Giri

Two particular days this week show what West Bengal’s new government thinks a university is for. On 9 September, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, dressed in saffron, led Naga sadhus and BJP workers on a three-kilometre march to the gates of Jadavpur University and vowed to ‘uproot’ students who raise azadi slogans.

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The next day, his government passed a law allowing the state to transfer university teachers from one campus to another, and he used the same Assembly session to order the arrest of people who had burned posters of a travelling godman. Students threatened, teachers made transferable, a baba protected—this is the new hierarchy in Bengal.

It is not what Bengal voted for. The BJP won 207 of 294 seats and 46 per cent of the vote on promises of clean recruitment (WBSSC), more jobs, women’s safety (with an emphasis on the RG Kar case), infrastructure development, more inward investment and finances. This week, more than 1,000 teachers who lost their jobs in the 2016 recruitment scam sat on the road outside Bikash Bhavan, urging the Chief Minister to fast-track fresh recruitment as he had promised before the election.

Instead, the current government has created further issues over OBC identification and classification, and the matter in court is becoming more complex; the next hearing will take place after 8 months. This matter could have been the first on his desk. However, most of his focus appears to be elsewhere—towards Jadavpur University.

Police Minister!

On the night of 20 August, a crowd carrying sticks and rods entered Jadavpur after midnight, burned student organisations’ flags and besieged students who were locked inside the administrative building. The ABVP denied involvement; an Alt News analysis of campus CCTV footage found senior ABVP members and BJP-linked workers at the scene.

But the Chief Minister ordered no inquiry. Outside the university’s locked gates, he asked students whether the azadi they wanted was freedom to take heroin and weed, called them the ‘tukde-tukde’ gang and warned: “I will expose you. I am that Police Minister.” At the 9 September march, he promised to return to recite the Gita and the Hanuman Chalisa and announced a three-day Vedic recital at the university itself.

Trinamool’s record on universities was no model either. It legislated to make the Chief Minister the chancellor of State universities while its student wing was repeatedly accused of campus intimidation. During that time, Jadavpur itself saw the 2023 death of a first-year student after alleged ragging and the March 2025 attack on the then education minister’s car. But that was a fight over control of student bodies.

What is new is the claim that a university must answer to religious authority. Sadhus may march on a campus to set its moral terms, and that scripture recitals are the remedy for student dissent. It also shows an inability to see that Bengal’s greatest reformers, from Vidyasagar to Tagore, built its classrooms by arguing with religious authority rather than submitting to it.

A government that won 207 seats does not need to threaten students but win them over with well-equipped classrooms, teachers, good hostels, and enough jobs

Saffronisation of Education

The next morning, after the march with Sadhus, the Chief Minister tabled a Bill in a one-day special session empowering the state to transfer teaching and non-teaching staff from one state university to another. On paper, this is staffing reform—the Chief Minister says experienced professors will help build new universities in places such as Jhargram and Cooch Behar. Though each university has its own policies, they are not part of a single system, so transfers may not be that easy in the current university education system.

Moreover, staff reforms should not be announced at saffron rallies outside a university campus that the Chief Minister has vowed to clean up. Teachers’ associations have warned of ‘selective targeting’. The Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association (JUTA) called the Bill ‘a direct attack on the self-reliance of the universities and job security’, and expressed concern that it would be used against critics. Once a government whose head calls students anti-national holds the power to post any professor to a distant campus, every lecture becomes a calculation.

The new Chief Minister is trying to colour the whole education system, from the school kitchen to the recruitment board. In Kolkata, the mid-day meal preparation in schools is being handed over to ISKCON. Teachers warn that it dismantles a decentralised model run by local women’s self-help groups. It has now been stopped in four districts.

Three of the four new members of the School Service Commission for teacher recruitment are Ramakrishna Mission monks. Their integrity is not in question, but Bengal has never before placed a religious order on a recruitment board. It signals that the current government has placed more faith in religious representation than in repairing failed institutions.

Furthermore, the Chief Minister promised 1,000 RSS-run Vidya Bharati schools within a year in those districts where he claims ‘more anti-national activities’ take place, along with new curriculum chapters on Bharat Sevashram Sangha founder Swami Pranabananda. Religious figures and babas, meanwhile, are gaining the standing that students and scholars are losing all over the country.

Bengal’s classrooms were built by people who argued with priests, not by processions of them: Ram Mohan Roy against ritual and caste, Vidyasagar against the orthodoxy that opposed widow remarriage and closed Sanskrit College to lower castes, and Tagore at Santiniketan, a school UNESCO recognises for its vision of humanity beyond religious lines.

These reformers, educators and campuses trained people to question. The cost of abandoning that may not be apparent in rankings alone right now. A generation taught to see questioning as disloyalty, by teachers afraid of transfer, will not argue with orthodoxy. It will kneel to it.

Self-defeating

Why does the ruling political party at present choose this path? Perhaps there is no plan yet for jobs, recruitment, infrastructure or health, so campus hooliganism in universities can fill the vacuum. Perhaps these spectacles are the plan—every day spent arguing about Jadavpur is a day not spent asking about development projects, new schemes and policies.

Either way, it is self-defeating. A government that won 207 seats does not need to threaten students at one of the best state public universities in India, ranked ninth among all universities, achieved on a state budget against centrally funded giants. It should win them over in well-equipped classrooms, with teachers, good hostels, and by creating enough jobs for them.

A state that marches sadhus to its best university, hands school kitchens and recruitment boards to religious orders, protects a godman from protest, and has legislated to make its professors transferable retrospectively is not reforming education. It risks creating more chaos and harming the current education system.

Bengal voted for change with respect to more jobs, teachers, and hospitals. It did not vote to hand its universities over to a war cry.

 

(The author is an International Research Fellow at the Academy of International Affairs NRW in Bonn and an Assistant Professor of Economics at CHRIST [Deemed to be University], Bengaluru. Views are personal)