By Prarthana Mitra
Former Union minister and UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor has been charged with aiding his wife’s death in 2014, according to a charge-sheet presented by the police at a Delhi court on Monday. Tharoor posted on Twitter later that day, vehemently asserting his innocence and claiming that these charges against him are “preposterous“.
Here’s what happened
51-year-old Sunanda Pushkar was found dead in her suite at a luxury hotel in Delhi on January 17, 2014, four years after marrying Tharoor. They had reportedly been fighting about Tharoor’s alleged affair with a Pakistani journalist at the time, which Pushkar tweeted about in the days leading up to her death. Witness accounts also place the couple having a huge fight in a flight from Kerala to Delhi, right before Pushkar checked into the hotel two days before her death.
Tharoor is the only accused named in the latest charge-sheet, which now holds him guilty of abetment to suicide and cruelty to spouse, under sections 306 and 498A respectively.
The initial report had put down her death as a suicide but the police later said she had been murdered, although they had not named a suspect at the time. After four years of thorough investigation during which Tharoor was questioned several times, the Delhi police submitted a 3000-page charge-sheet, dismissing murder but claiming that circumstances had driven Pushkar to commit suicide. Besides having a history of abusing anti-depressants without a prescription, she had not been eating or even leaving her hotel room, the charge-sheet says.
Why you should care
Tharoor, a Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, tweeted that he intends to vigorously contest the charges levied against him.
In July last year, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy filed a PIL demanding a time-bound court-monitored probe in the case since it involved influential people whom he thought were being shielded or were causing unnecessary delay in the delivery of due justice. Swamy added the Delhi Police had not arrested anyone and no custodial interrogation took place, despite post-mortem examination had confirmed Sunandas death was “unnatural” and “due to poison.” No arrests have been in the case made so far.
Prarthana Mitra is a staff writer at Qrius