Calcutta High Court Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay met a group of State-Level Selection Test (SLST) candidates outside his residence on Wednesday and advised them to approach the Legal Aid Forum to get a lawyer who could represent them in court for free.
A group of around 50 school job aspirants reached Justice Gangopadhyay’s house in Salt Lake area of Kolkata to speak to him. Initially, the security personnel outside his house tried to stop them but later Justice Gangopadhyay came down to meet them.
The job aspirants claimed that they were yet to be recruited despite having cleared the exam. They also told Justice Gangopadhyay that they didn’t have the financial resources to fight their cases in the court as they were unemployed and had been protesting for over 1,000 days near the Gandhi statue in Kolkata.
The candidates had cleared SLST for classes 9 to 12 conducted by the West Bengal Central School Service Commission (WBCSSC) in 2016, but did not get a job due to the alleged school jobs recruitment scam. “I can’t give you a job. For that, you must go to court. If you are eligible, then arrangements will be made. Even if you sit on the street for 200 years, it will not be useful,” Justice Gangopadhyay told the candidates in Bengali.
“Go to the Legal Aid Forum and submit an application. Surely, you will get free legal help from there. The chief minister of this state is very humane,” he added.
“I feel the pain of the unemployed youth but everything has a method. You need to find out the reason why the job is stuck. Consult a lawyer first,” Justice Gangopadhyay said.
Wednesday also marked the second day when Justice Gangopadhyay stayed away from the Calcutta High Court following the Bar Association’s decision to boycott him after he ordered the arrest of a lawyer for criminal contempt.
On Monday, Justice Gangopadhyay had ordered the arrest of lawyer Prasenjit Mukherjee for alleged criminal contempt when the latter cited a division bench judgment that had modified a single bench’s order.
Later, the Bar Association wrote a letter to Chief Justice TS Sivagnanam, mentioning the “extreme insult meted out” to Mukherjee where Justice Gangopadhyay held him “guilty of criminal contempt and disrobed him in the open court, and sent him to a civil prison in the custody of the Sheriff from the courtroom through the corridor of the High Court”.
After the letter, the High Court held a special late evening hearing at 8.30 pm on Monday where a division bench of Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Hiranmay Bhattacharya stayed the direction for the lawyer’s arrest. The High Court shifted all the cases scheduled in Justice Gangopadhyay’s court to the single bench of Justice Sougata Bhattacharya.
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