Supreme Court Directs Calcutta High Court To Re-Consider TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee's Foreign Travel Plea

The Supreme Court today has asked the Calcutta High Court to re-consider Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee's plea seeking permission to travel abroad for eye treatment.

The TMC leader approached the Supreme Court after the High Court had earlier declined to give him immediate relief. It had said that the TMC leader should first get his eye's condition assessed by a hospital in Kolkata to see if its treatment can be done within India.

Last month, the High Court refused to immediately grant Banerjee permission to travel abroad and said that the grant of such permission would only be considered after the SSKM Hospital found that the eye treatment was not possible in Kolkata.

Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan appeared for Abhishek Banerjee before the Supreme Court and urged it to grant the TMC leader relief. Sankaranarayanan told the bench that it may take time for the High Court to decide on Banerjee's foreign travel plea, given the large backlog of cases pending there. "1500 cases are there in the combined list..", he submitted.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the State of West Bengal suggested that the matter may be fixed for hearing on a specific date.

Accordingly, the bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana today requested the High Court to take a final call in the matter within a week's time.

Maintaining that the court was not inclined to allow the petitioner to travel abroad when the investigation was underway, Justice Bhattacharyya said there are several reputed eye clinics in Kolkata. In an oral observation, Justice Bhattacharyya said the TMC MP should appear before the head of ophthalmology at the state-run SSKM Hospital, who will decide whether Banerjee's eye issue can be treated there.

The TMC leader had approached the High Court seeking quashing of the FIR over his alleged comments against leaders and workers of BJP at a public meeting on April 27 in the run-up to the second phase of the West Bengal assembly polls.

Two days back, Calcutta High Court heard the Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee plea seeking urgent protection from a growing list of FIRs filed against him since May. Justice Saugata Bhattacharya, unconvinced that arrest was warranted at this stage, ordered that no coercive steps be taken against Banerjee until the case is heard again on August 6, and directed the police to hand over a full account of every FIR registered against him so far.

Banerjee's plea, filed under Article 226, does not ask the court to quash the FIRs outright just yet, it asks for breathing room while a larger question is argued out: whether eleven complaints and FIRs, most of them lodged in the weeks after the Assembly election results came out on May 4, add up to a coordinated campaign rather than genuine law enforcement.

Additional Solicitor General S.V. Raju objected that Banerjee's petition improperly bundled unrelated FIRs into one "omnibus" plea, suggesting that if the court wanted to examine only complaints with disclosed particulars, Banerjee should have filed separate petitions for each. The Bench did not dismiss the case over this, but it trimmed what it would consider restricting itself to FIRs where facts were already on record, since even the state had not shared details of some complaints with the petitioner.

Banerjee's counsel walked the court through individual complaints he said didn't hold up to scrutiny. One stemmed from a tweet in which Banerjee used the phrase "Bangla birodhi Gujarati gang" political rhetoric, Sankaranarayanan argued, not incitement. Another concerned a remark about playing music loudly at a rally. Others reached far into the past: an illegal-mining allegation from 2017, a cyclone-relief fund dispute from 2020, and questions about a private welfare scheme for elderly beneficiaries that Banerjee ran from 2023.

Case Title: Abhishek Banerjee Vs State of West Bengal

Hearing Date: August 3, 2026