Ousted leader of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam VK Sasikala was released on parole for five days on Friday to visit her ailing husband M Natarajan, who has been hospitalised for more than a month. She had applied for a 15-day parole.
Sasikala’s nephew and ousted AIADMK leader TTV Dinakaran went to Bengaluru’s Parappana Agrahara Central Prison to receive her as she was released.
However, several questions have been raised about the dual organ transplant Natarajan underwent on Wednesday. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tamil Nadu President Tamilisai Soundararajan alleged that several rules were violated during the transplant, the Deccan Chronicle reported.
The 74-year-old received a kidney and a liver from a 19-year-old brain dead patient, N Karthik, at the Gleneagles Global Health City hospital in Chennai. Karthik, a daily wage labourer in Tamil Nadu’s Pudukkottai, was in an accident on Saturday evening.
After being treated at local hospitals for a few days, Karthik was airlifted to Gleneagles hospital on Tuesday morning against medical advice, The Times of India reported. Gleneagles said his had come to the hospital for a second opinion, and despite treatment, he became brain dead on Tuesday.
Soundararajan urged the Tamil Nadu government to conduct an inquiry and find out how Karthik’s family could afford to airlift him to Chennai. She said he should have been transferred to a government hospital and questioned why he was taken to the private facility instead.
A senior professor from a government medical college also asked how the family could afford to pay around Rs 2 lakh for the air ambulance, according to The Indian Express.
“Was this orchestrated to save the life of a privileged patient while denying the same to those on the Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu waiting list?” he asked. “Was there an organised network on behalf of the VIP patient to track down all potential donors in hospitals across the state?”
Sasikala’s lawyer had told ANI earlier in the day that the Chennai police commissioner had sent an email to the jail authorities agreeing to her parole as long as she meets certain conditions. “If she is able to affix her signature accepting all the conditions, then she will [be] out within half an hour,” he said.
On October 3, the Karnataka prisons department had rejected it saying the application was inadequate, and asked her to submit a fresh one with more details.
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