BJP’s Abhijit Ganguly gets HC relief in ‘attempt to murder’ case

KOLKATA: Relying upon the Supreme Court’s order granting interim bail to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, the Calcutta High Court on Thursday extended interim relief to former judge and BJP candidate from Tamluk Lok Sabha seat Abhijit Gangopadhyay.

Gangopadhyay approached the Court on May 13 in connection with an attempted murder case filed against him.The matter was mentioned before Justice Jay Sengupta. Lawyer representing Gangopadhyay, Rajdeep Majumder, alleged overreaction on the part of the police and that the FIR was lodged to prevent him from campaigning for the election. According to a news report, Justice Sengupta said that he knows the former judge closely and therefore released the matter from his list. He ordered for the matter to be placed before Chief Justice T S Sivagnanam for it to be heard by another judge. Gangopadhyay had resigned as a judge of the Calcutta High Court in March. Allowing interim relief, Justice Tirthankar Ghosh stated the recent order by Supreme Court in granting interim bail to Delhi CM and observed that since Gangopadhyay is contesting in election, the observations of SC “squarely applies.” According to a news agency, the SC had taken into account general elections to Lok Sabha where 650-700 million voters out of an electorate of around 970 million voters would cast their vote to elect the government for the next five years.

The Advocate General for the state submitted that the writ petition admitted the occurrence of the incident and no denial has come from the petitioner. It added that during registration of the FIR, the police checks whether a cognizable offence has been made out or not.However, the Bench has stayed the proceedings till June 14 and the state was directed to file its affidavit-in-opposition.