Sunanda Pushkar was murdered, so what's new?

A picture is worth a thousand words, you probably have heard this line a million times over. For investigative journalists, a picture tells a thousand stories. So when photographs of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of then Union minister Shashi Tharoor, found dead in a Delhi five-star hotel room last year, taken by a police photographer, landed in India Legal office six months ago, I knew I had something that I needed to tell the world.

The close-up pictures, taken from different angles, revealed several injuries and bruises, which were also revealed in the post-mortem report conducted at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. However, the report also indicated that these injuries were not fatal. A closer look, however, revealed a different story.

Being a crime reporter, I felt something was amiss. I was also well aware of how police and forensic doctors function and I know how high-profile cases get manipulated. I was pretty sure an attempt had been made to cover up the case. This is how I figured it out.

The evidence of manipulation could be easily ascertained by the fact that the police were keen to project the case as a death due to “overdose” of sleeping pills. The information, leaked to the media, stated that two bottles of “Alprax” were found on the table, next to the bed on which Sunanda Pushkar’s body was found. The reason the “overdose” story was "planted" is perhaps because the police did not want to examine the circumstances of her death. In a case of suicide, they still needed to probe whether it was a case of “abetment to suicide" or not. So the safest way to close the case as quickly as possible was to treat it as a case of “overdose”.

But why did the police not look into circumstances leading to her death? Well, it was all in public domain. A week prior to her death, there were media reports of Shashi Tharoor and Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar. There was also an interview of Pushkar's, how she took Shashi’s blame in the IPL controversy. She had called up prominent TV journalists seeking air time to air her views. She had made public what she called text exchanges between Shashi Tharoor and Mehr Tarar.

This would require the police to look into all these revelations; take statement of all the characters involved; which would in all likelihood have opened a Pandora's box. Was it because the police did not want to look at all these angles or were they “pressured” to look the other way?

Through my sources, I learnt that two senior Cabinet ministers were following this case extremely keenly; coordinating to see that the course of probe was being orchestrated towards a predetermined closure. So that the case was declared a normal death. One of the ministers was the Delhi Police’s boss and the other of AIIMS where the forensic examination of Sunanda Pushkar was conducted. Go figure.

Now that there was evidence of struggle and physical force, my editor Inderjeet Badhwar and I agreed to publish these pictures and put together a story highlighting the gaps in police story manipulation done to make Sunanda Pushkar’s death appear “natural”. Between us, there was no second opinion that it was a case of murder. The Delhi Police will need to offer a lot of explanation as to why she was murdered, even if they finally catch the murderer(s).