Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 18: The Congress Member of Parliament and former union minister Shashi Tharoor was on Wednesday cleared by a Delhi court of charges of “abetment to suicide” or involvement in the “murder” following the mysterious death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar in a Delhi hotel room in 2014.
Sunanda,51, was found dead in a suite of a luxury hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, while Shashi Tharoor was attending a Congress meet in Delhi along with then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Gandhis and the entire Congress leadership.
The Tharoors had moved into the hotel because the MP’s home was being renovated. Shashi Tharoor, he chairman of the parliamentary committee on information technology, was charged with abetment to suicide and cruelty by the Delhi Police.
The court on Wednesday refused to accept a Delhi Police charge-sheet that said Tharoor, 65, should be investigated and cleared the former Union Minister of all charges.
“Most grateful, your honour. It’s been seven-and-half years of absolute torture. I really appreciate it,” Tharoor said after the court verdict. .
In a longer statement later, he wrote that his family would finally mourn Sunanda Pushkar in peace. “This brings a significant conclusion to the long nightmare which had enveloped me after the tragic passing of my late wife Sunanda. I have weathered dozens of unfounded accusations and media vilification patiently, sustained my faith in the judiciary, which today stands vindicated,” he wrote.
Tharoor said in the current system of justice, the process was all too often the punishment. The Congress leader, seeking his discharge, had told the court that evidence showed the death of Sunanda Pushkar was neither a suicide nor homicide. The death should be considered an accident, he had said, as Ms Pushkar had been struggling with various medical ailments at the time of her death.
“Not even a single witness” had made any allegations of dowry, harassment or cruelty against Tharoor, his lawyer Vikas Pahwa had argued. The lawyer also said a Special Investigation Team had exonerated the politician.
After years of investigation by the police, the prosecution had failed to conclusively establish the cause of Ms Pushkar’s death, the court was told.
Tharoor and Ms Pushkar married in 2010. Her death four years later triggered shock and speculation in political circles, especially as some of her last tweets hinted at a rift between the two and appeared to accuse the MP of an affair with a Pakistani journalist.
A post mortem revealed no apparent reason for her death. A week after her death, the police claimed she seemed to have died of hidden poisoning.
A year later, they registered a murder case without naming any suspect. Three years later, they charged Tharoor. Tharoor, frequently targeted by political rivals over the case, had called the charges “preposterous and baseless” and the product of a “malicious and vindictive campaign”.
The Tharoors were often in the media glare over allegations of IPL corruption, which led to his resignation as a Union Minister and “50 crore girlfriend” jibes from the BJP.
“The truth has finally prevailed. The persistent abuse, slander and vilification of our colleague Tharoor by BJP and TV anchors… today the court has finally held that Tharoor has nothing to do with the alleged murder. Will the PM come forward and apologise for his remarks to Tharoor and Congress party? The falsehood and lies of BJP have fallen flat,” said Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.
For three years Tharoor’s lawyer senior advocate Vikas Pahwa and the state prosecutor, Atul Kumar Shrivastava, have been arguing on the point of charge in this high voltage case which went through various twists and turns.
This included arguments by the prosecutor asking the court to charge Tharoor under murder sections which caught Tharoor’s legal team by surprise. Furthermore, the prosecution at one time also alleged that the Special Investigation Team (SIT) had to approach the FBI stating that a forensic report released when the Congress Government was in power was incorrect.
In August, 2019, the Delhi Police for the first time asked the court to prosecute Tharoor for abetment to suicide or “alternatively” frame murder charges against him. The prosecution had relied on three medical reports and claimed that the “cause of death was poisoning, probably Alprazolam poisoning.”
Pahwa had rebutted that in all these years “the cause of death could not be determined and they are going from one door to another. We have to speak from the evidence and not just from the air.”
Furthermore, the prosecutor had relied on a statement by Pushkar’s son, Shiv Menon’s statement to the SDM which read: “My mother is a strong woman she cannot commit suicide.”
But what later may have clinched the issue was a statement by her son which was read out in the court in March, this year, which stated that Tharoor “could not have murdered his mother as he could not have even hurt a fly.” This was the first time Menon’s statement was read out in court with some detailing the relationship shared between Tharoor and Pushkar, the difficulties they faced and Menon’s last few days with his mother.