Abhijit Gangopadhyay. File
| Photo Credit: ANI

Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) MP and former Calcutta High Court judge, Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who fell critically ill with acute pancreatitis, was airlifted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences-New Delhi on Thursday, according to party officials. He was initially admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a private medical facility in Kolkata on June 14.

BJP West Bengal State president Sukanta Majumdar noted that Mr. Gangopadhyay’s condition was slowly deteriorating, and he needed better care, so his family and party officials decided to shift him to AIIMS Delhi.

In a statement after his release, Kolkata’s Woodlands Multispeciality Hospital’s Managing Director and CEO Rupak Barua said, “Given the criticality of the illness, it was decided by the medical board consisting of the family members and all treating consultants to transfer Mr. Gangopadhyay to a specialised centre for continuation of care. He is now being transferred to the healthcare facility under supervision of an accompanying medical team through an air ambulance.”

A green corridor was created in the city to transfer him from the private hospital in Kolkata to the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata. From there, he was shifted to an air ambulance and taken to AIIMS.

The 63-year-old Lok Sabha MP was admitted to Woodlands hospital on Saturday with complaints of vomiting, abdominal pain, and abdominal distension, according to an official statement shared by the hospital. A multidisciplinary medical board, comprising an internal medicine and critical care specialist, cardiologist, pulmonologist, endocrinologist, gastroenterologist, and gastrointestinal surgeon, was formed to attend to the parliamentarian.

Multiple BJP leaders had gone to visit him at the Kolkata hospital.

Nilanjan Das, Trinamool Congress’s State general secretary of the IT & Social Media Wing, wished Mr. Gangopadhyay a speedy recovery in a social media post on X.

Mr. Gangopadhyay was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2024 from the Tamluk constituency in Purba Medinipur district of West Bengal. Formerly, he was a judge in the Calcutta High Court till he resigned in 2024 and announced that he was joining the BJP.

During his tenure as a Calcutta High Court judge, he had ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2022 to probe the irregularities in the recruitment of teaching and non-teaching staff by the West Bengal School Service Commission and West Bengal Board of Secondary Education.