8 hours Ago
Former India cricket captain Sourav Ganguly has reportedly turned down an invitation from a group of teachers, who have lost their jobs following the Supreme Court's recent verdict on the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) recruitment scam, to join their protest march to the state secretariat. The teachers went to the residence of Sourav Ganguly on Thursday to invite him to a march to West Bengal state secretariat 'Nabanna' on April 21, but the police stopped them and took them to a police station "to discuss procedural issues" before issuing such invites, news agency PTI reported. The teachers who tried to go to Ganguly's residence belong to a platform, 'Chakrihara Oikyamanch', which had issued the call for a rally to Nabanna demanding immediate steps by the Mamata Banerjee-led government to restore the jobs of the "untainted" candidates through legal submission before the Supreme Court.
However, according to a report by ABP Ananda, Ganguly told the teachers, “Please don’t involve me in politics.” HT.com couldn't independently verify the news.
They were also part of the 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff of state-sponsored and -aided schools who lost their jobs after the Supreme Court found large-scale irregularities in the 2016 recruitment process and scrapped the entire panel on April 3. Those who were rendered jobless claimed that the reason behind their plight was the inability of the School Service Commission (SSC), which appointed them, to differentiate between the candidates who secured employment through fraudulent means and those who did not. "We wanted to go to the residence of Sourav Ganguly, who is a popular figure and an icon, to intervene so that chief minister Mamata Banerjee holds talks with us.
We wanted to meet Dada (Sourav) and invite him to our rally. We are carrying an invite for him," one of the three jobless teachers told reporters near the residence of Ganguly in Behala area in south Kolkata. When the teachers were asked to hand over the invite to the staff in Ganguly's office, they refused and insisted on meeting him personally.
Police officials came to the spot and asked the three teachers to accompany them to Thakurpukur police station, saying invitations cannot be handed over to Ganguly without a prior appointment. (With inputs from PTI).
