Paritosh Canning loses control of the La Martiniere Schools
The Bishop of Kolkata Reverend Paritosh Canning has lost control of the board of governors of the La Martiniere Schools.
The Calcutta High Court, in a judgment dated July 13, stated that the Reverend Canning-appointed board cannot take any more decisions and the decisions taken by them till now, except those related to the administration of the schools, will become null and void.
The La Martinere schools, one of the oldest and most prestigious English-medium institutions in Kolkata, is run by a board of governors, of whom two are ex-officio members and the other four are nominated by the ex-officio members for a year, and are known as acting governors.
In March 2019, Kolkata Bishop Probal Kanto Dutta, as one of the ex-officio governors, along with the other, Reverend Swarup Bar, the presbyter of St Andrew’s Church, had appointed Anil Mukherji, Gerry Arathoon, Suchitra Guha and Anjali Das as acting governors.
In the second week of June, Reverend Dutta was transferred back to Durgapur, eight months after he had come from there to take charge of the Kolkata diocese, a move controversial in itself.
His replacement, Reverend Paritosh Canning (the new bishop of the Kolkata diocese appointed by the Church of North India), along with Reverend Bar, removed the four acting governors and replaced them with others.
The reason cited by Canning was that the four were appointed by a wrong process.
In a June 2019 article by The Telegraph, one of the ousted governors, Gerry Arathoon is quoted as writing in his letter of protest to Reverend Canning that if they were indeed appointed by a wrong process by Reverend Dutta, why the other ex-officio member, Reverend Bar had not opposed the decision.
Two of the ousted members, instead, told The Telegraph that they had been “sacked” because they had protested the “unilateral” decision of the two ex-officio members (Reverends Canning and Bar) to remove Michael Shane Calvert (a former nominated MLA of the Bengal Assembly) from the post of the secretary of the La Martiniere schools and reinstate Supriyo Dhar. Dhar had resigned from the post in October 2018.
The four deposed acting governors later challenged the decision of their removal from the board before the Calcutta High Court. Today’s judgment was the outcome of that challenge.
