Former Calcutta High Court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: Former Calcutta High Court judge and current BJP MP Abhijit Gangopadhyay on Wednesday said he had "nothing to comment" on the division bench's decision to overturn his 2023 order cancelling appointments of 32,000 primary school teachers, but stated that he had passed the judgment as he believed was correct.
Gangopadhyay, whose judgment had cancelled the appointments citing corruption and irregularities in the 2016 recruitment process, told a Bengali news channel that the division bench had full authority to review his decision.
"The division bench has the power to adjudicate. They have done what they felt was right. I have nothing to say about it. As a judge, I had passed the order, which I believed to be correct," he said.
Gangopadhyay resigned from the judiciary in March 2024 and subsequently joined the BJP, contesting and winning from Tamluk Lok Sabha seat.
These 32,000 teachers were recruited in 2016 through the Teachers' Eligibility Test (TET) panel of 2014 by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education. A division bench, comprising Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Reetabrata Kumar Mitra, said it is not inclined to uphold the single bench order as irregularities have not been proven in all the recruitments.
The reversal of Gangopadhyay's earlier ruling triggered a strong political response from the ruling Trinamool Congress, with party MP and senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee welcoming the court's decision as a "victory of truth".
Banerjee, who had represented petitioners before the Supreme Court and later in the High Court, said the judgment vindicated the stand he had maintained since 2023.
"I am extremely happy. We fought this legal battle from April-May 2023 till December 2025. When the jobs were cancelled, we approached the Supreme Court, which sent the matter to the division bench. Today the truth has prevailed," he told reporters.
Taking direct aim at Gangopadhyay, Banerjee alleged that the former judge's 2023 order had been driven by political motives.
"When a judge carries political thinking, such orders can come from someone like Abhijit Gangopadhyay," he said.
"There was thoroughly political intention behind that verdict, and now it has been proven. He had said he would 'take away' their jobs. Today, we have ensured their jobs remain, and it has been shown that Abhijit Gangopadhyay was wrong," Banerjee added.
Gangopadhyay's 2023 order cancelling the jobs was later stayed by the division bench of the Calcutta High Court.
Earlier this year, in a separate case, the Supreme Court cancelled the appointment of nearly 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staff recruited through the State Level Selection Test (SLST) for classes 9-12 after finding large-scale irregularities in that process.