Maoist leader offers his body for medical research

Senior Maoist leader Purnendu Shekhar Mukherjee, currently lodged in Bhagalpur jail, has offered to donate his body for medical research.

Senior Maoist leader Purnendu Shekhar Mukherjee, currently lodged in Bhagalpur jail, has offered to donate his body for medical research.

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The 70-year old central committee member of the CPI (Maoist) has written to the Bhagalpur jail superintendent expressing his willingness to donate his body for medical research and his eyes to needy persons belonging to deprived section of the society.

“The Maoist leader said, he wanted to donate his body only to a medical research institute in West Bengal,” jail superintendent Jitendra Kumar told HT on Thursday.

“The eyes should be donated to anybody who requires them the most. But I would be happy if my eyes are donated to a person belonging to the deprived sections of the society,” the letter submitted to the jail official on September 13 said.

Kumar said the letter had been forwarded to the IG, Prisons for necessary action. “There are three central committee members in the jail. I have not seen any Maoist making such an offer before,” he said.

Mukherjee, who hails from West Bengal, was arrested along with two central committee members, Vijay Kumar Arya and Varanasi Subramaniam from Katihar district on May 1 this year by a joint police team of the Special Task Force and the district police. The top Maoist functionaries were wanted in connection with armed uprisings and other cases in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

While Subramaniam, 58, hails from Andhra Pradesh’s Prakasam district and carried a cash reward of Rs 12 lakh on his head, Arya belongs to Bihar and had been active in underground operations in south-central Bihar for the last 25 years.

Hundreds of Maoists including their top leaders have been lodged in Bihar’s 54 jails. Some of them are from Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and neighbouring Nepal.