This time, it was Vivekananda Vidya Vikas Parishad (VVVP) that was hosting the event in Kolkata's premises when Suvendu Adhikari, the chief minister, turned a school function into a political rally. The speech to this saffron group of educationists soon transformed into a blanket criticism of four decades of West Bengal's administration, a period that saw the Left Front's three and a half decades in power and the Trinamool Congress years thereafter. In his blunt speech, he claimed that neither regime was merely a failure in the governance of schools; both were failures of a kind that created a curriculum that divided.

The details he provided are unusually detailed for a political speech. The changes in Bengali language textbooks, where Amma replaced Ma and Asman replaced Akash, were an intentional "blurring" of language identity, Adhikari claimed, alleging that the modifications were done without any public debate.Adhikari said the changes, including the replacement of Amma with Ma and Asman with Akash in Bengali language textbooks, were a "blurring" of language identity and were not being made in accordance with any public debate.

He further alleged that books by Bengali reformist and nationalist stalwarts Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Swami Vivekananda were thrust aside in the syllabus. However, it is not certain that each textbook correction reflects his history and revisions in the history of the theatre have been rejected by TMC figures as revisionist theatre. Its political logic, however, is transparent: Vidyasagar and Vivekananda had been associated with what the BJP deems 'appeasement politics' and can be easily brought into its fold, as part of a larger project of re-inventing Bengali identity as Hindu nationalist-friendly.

The Chief Minister went beyond the realm of language politics. He said that the Left Front had denied English education in primary schools for more than 30 years, which the CPI(M) itself admitted as a blunder later in the year when it realized that Bengali graduates were falling behind in the race with students from the states where English education was introduced early.

He went on to say that the Trinamool government was super-imposing another form of politics over this injury with the establishment of a school chapter on the Singur land agitation, which was the trigger behind the Nano project coming to Gujarat from the protest against the plant of Tata Motors for small cars. An attempt to tie together two decades of industrial retreat with classroom content, framing student anger at Singur as a sign of curricular manipulation is a smart way to show, in this context, that Trinamool has never had to respond in this manner before.

Adhikari wasn't satisfied with the past. Had things gone on as they had been for the past two centuries, he added, the school system in Bengal would have looked more like the Islamic education system in Bangladesh, a provocative comparison that immediately elicited condemnations from the opposition benches and minority rights groups that it was “communally loaded” and “factually thin”. He also used the word "statesmanship" and "patriotism" in the curriculum to be incorporated by his government, and this is a reflection of the National Education Policy's civilisational framing and indicates that Bengal's textbook rewrite, which has been in consultation since earlier this year after the BJP won the assembly election, will be closely mimicking that.

There is an enormous operational and financial mess behind the rhetoric which was quite inherited by the new government. Clusters of classrooms in various districts of the state were left short of qualified teachers after the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling overturned an estimated 25,752 vacant appointments made under the 2016 School Service Commission, following complaints by CBI investigators that mark sheets were forged, there were ghost candidates and OMR sheets were manipulated on a massive scale.

The rush to fill that void gave rise to new recruitment campaigns that brought in a new wave of 5.9 lakh candidates in 2025, and over 5 lakh candidates appeared in the exams of the twin SLST (classes 9 to 12) across more than a thousand centres, of whom a significant number came from outside Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. WBSSC later notified 35,726 fresh posts of teaching roles, which were 17 per cent reserved for OBCs, which too was a new legal flash point. It is this scam as well as the act of compensation, litigation and loss of instructional years that it inflicted on the country that gave Adhikari's government the strongest economic reason to replace the Trinamul government in May.

Fiscal consequences are not insignificant, either. The education budget of West Bengal is in the tens of thousands of crores every year, one of the biggest items in a state with a limited revenue base considering its population of around ten crore. The decline in the number of teachers, the restive conditions on the campuses and the dent to the state's reputation due to the scam have coincided with the growth of enrolment from private and out-of-state schools and have been a silent leak in the state's competitiveness with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and even neighbouring Odisha in attracting skilled investments, economists monitoring human capital indices in eastern India have said in recent years.

Adhikari further raised the issue of the graffiti on the college walls which still feature a "Free Palestine" and "Kashmir Mange Azadi" slogan at Jadavpur University, and reiterated a zero-tolerance policy towards anti-national activities on college campuses. Civil liberties groups have already raised concerns over the implications of that stance, pointing out that it could be misused to expand surveillance of normal student dissent as well as secure.

This week, what comes out of Kolkata is not so much an announcement, as a governing narrative, unfolding in real time. The new government is piecing together language politics, a recruitment scandal that has real monetary consequences and a civilisational rewriting of the syllabus that is a single narrative of restoring what it claims as "Bengal's lost pride".

Whether that story will get a second chance at life in the state's chronically underfunded classrooms, or whether it will simply be another chapter of a syllabus already charged by critics with teaching power instead of pedagogy, will be the experience of Bengal's next generation of students.Earlier, the Supreme Court scrapped around 25,752 school jobs.