Calcutta HC to hear today Abhishek Banerjee’s plea to travel abroad for eye treatment

Kolkata, Aug 5 (IANS) The Calcutta High Court’s single judge bench of Justice Sougata Bhattacharya will hear the petition from Abhishek Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress general secretary and Lok Sabha member, seeking permission to travel overseas for ophthalmic treatment.

Last month, the same bench rejected the plea from Banerjee for permission to travel overseas for ophthalmic treatment and instead advised him to first consult experts from the state-run S.S.K.M. Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.

Justice Bhattacharya also observed that the court will take a further decision in the matter only after seeing the report from S.S.K.M.

Thereafter, Banerjee approached the Supreme Court seeking the same permission. However, the apex court’s three-judge division bench of Chief Justice of India Suya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Venkita Subramani Mohan, last week, referred the matter to the Calcutta High Court.

The apex court also directed the Calcutta High Court to take a decision in the matter in seven days. Accordingly, Justice Bhattacharya had fixed 11 a.m. on Wednesday as the time for hearing in the matter.

To recall, in the course of the previous hearing at Calcutta High Court on July 20, Justice Bhattacharya also raised the question of whether the Diamond Harbour MP had consulted any ophthalmology specialist.

On the same day, Justice Bhattacharya extended till October the interim protection to the Diamond Harbour MP from coercive police action, including arrest in the hate speech case, where he had been accused of making violence-inciting statements and even threatening Union Home Minister Amit Shah at a campaign rally before the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly polls.

Justice Bhattacharya, at the same time, directed Banerjee to cooperate with the police in the investigation process and also directed the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to wind up the probe into the matter at the earliest.

In October 2016, Abhishek Banerjee was involved in an accident on his way back to Kolkata from a party programme in Murshidabad district. He suffered serious injuries to his eye in that accident. He first visited several hospitals in the country and later sought treatment abroad.

–IANS

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