An auxiliary (primary) member of the West Bengal CPM – Sourendranath Ghosh (also known as Bubai Ghosh) – posted a meme on his Facebook page which he thought was funny. The Facebook post led to a controversy, especially after he tagged a few “comrades” who expressed unhappiness about the content of the post.
In his bid to make fun of the Kanyashree scheme under the Mamata Banerjee government, Ghosh ridicules the girls who have topped the Madhyamik examinations (class X final exams of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education). His post says that the good performance of girls in this year’s Madhyamik exams had been done “deliberately” in order to highlight the success of the Kanyashree scheme.
In the meme, Ghosh Bubai (his Facebook profile) showed a picture of Bollywood actor Madhuri Dixit saying in Bengali that girls in the West Bengal board have performed better [than boys], and this is the answer shown in the meme: “was their performance good? Or was it shown that way to highlight Kanyashree?” (korlo, na korano holo? Kanyashree aro ektu highlight holo”).
The comment ridicules and questions the performance of the girls in the Madhyamik examinations. Interestingly, the pass percentage of male students is 89.87 per cent and female students is 81.86 per cent.
The topper this year is a girl, Sanjibani Debnath, from Suniti Academy of Cooch Behar stood first, scoring 689 out of 700 in the Madhyamik. She topped among 11,02,726 students in the state.
Sourendranath Ghosh did not regret posting the meme however. He simply said, “I posted it just for fun.” He also tagged a number of his “comrades”, including CPM state committee member, Rupa Bagchi.
Bagchi did not approve of this post. “A lot of people tag me on Facebook. I should not have been tagged here. I think it is a great achievement of the girl who stood first this year, and an achievement for every topper. They worked hard and succeeded. Their achievement should not be belittled.”
Kanyashree is a United Nations award winning scheme of the West Bengal government with 1,21,40,445 enrolled applications and 48,57,976 beneficiaries. It is a scheme for girls from economically disadvantaged families to continue studies so that they are not married off before they reach the age of 18, by offering them cash incentives.
