Media trials and the Sunanda Pushkar case

Sunanda Pushkar’s life ended abruptly. The investigation into her death however, seems to be developing into a news saga which would rival any K-series soap from the house of Balaji telefilms. The dramatis personae include, angry anchors, media and page 3 personalities, a politician with a perennial conspiracy theory, bumbling cops, doctors who treated a patient and doctors who sawed her apart for an autopsy. The miasma of suspicion that dares not speak its name, is centred around the dealings of a once glamorous husband, now reduced to a sullen silence, skulking around literary festivals.

The media that lost a scam story due to Sunanda’s sudden death, may just have a conflation of circumstances, helping it build another potent narrative. Was the death too conveniently timed, to prevent an exposure? Was the death procured; if so by whom and how? Is investigatorial inertia, deliberate or induced by political considerations? Will someone get away with murder, if murder indeed it was?

In this case, Shashi Tharoor was a media favourite since he parachuted to Kerala politics from the UN. An involvement with the Kochi team, in cricket’s glamour model, the IPL seemed a logical extension. Sunanda Pushkar as she then was, made some effort to rope in finance from the Malayali enclave of Dubai. The grant of sweat equity for her efforts, was widely seen to be a convenient fig leaf for Tharoor who later married her. When the initial storm broke, due to a tweet from Lalit Modi, she had to give up her equity, and he had to give up his ministership.

Yet they had each other and the world before them dipping into their luminescent existence among the movers and shakers of the UPA in Delhi. Her Kashmiri wazwans at the Lodhi Estate residence, became a thing of delight for the interactors of Lutyens Delhi. In the background also lurked Sunanda’s ill health, which she thought was possibly life threatening. Her tweets in October 2013, said that her doctors thought that she had lupus, a medical condition that compromises the body’s immunity.

Shashi in the meanwhile, continued to as the glamour boy, for the word drunk UPA groupies. He had been reinducted into the ministry after an interval of time. He continued to interact in the twitterverse and elsewhere, with a variety of admirers. Three years into the marriage, when a Twitter war broke out between Sunanda and the Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, over Shashi, few expected the fight to escalate into Sunanda’s furious denunciations of her husband. A rift turned into rancour, rancour into remonstration. Sunanda told a lot of her media friends, that she was ready to spill some beans, on Shashi and the IPL which would finish his political career. the Lok Sabha elections were barely a few months away and Shashi’s renomination for the Trivandrum Lok Sabha seat may not have withstood another media storm.

Sunanda checked into the Leela Palace Hotel in the morning of January 16, 2014. She was last seen in the lobby of the hotel at 3.30 in the afternoon of January 17. Around that time, her husband was seen in a very public Congress rally at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium. When he returned to the hotel room at around 8pm, he found her dead and called the police. The media was on the scene in no time whatsoever, and ever since we have had a soap opera that has dominated television news ever since.

Criminal investigative resources are in short supply in the country. Committing them to a newsworthy cause, without a conclusive determination of homicidal death, cannot normally be justified. However a disproportionate media interest in this death, has ensured that investigative energy must be seen to be expended. In the initial days, with the UPA government still in power, the focus seemed to be on reassuring the sceptical that the untimeliness of the death was only coincidental and that the underlying medical condition, had been exacerbated by stress and rendered lethal by a cocktail of drugs, possibly ingested voluntarily.

With the change in government, and the case not yet closed, it has become a fertile ground for opportunity seekers. A doctor on the post-mortem team, in the course of his personal promotion case before the administrative tribunal, urged that he had possibly been pressurised into hasty conclusions. A medical board was constituted and finally in December 2014, it  opined that the death was not natural but was due to poisoning.

This was the cue that launched a perfect feeding frenzy amongst television channels. Poisoning can be accidental, suicidal or homicidal. The fact of poisoning, Sunanda’s conversations with television journalists on January 16, 2014, and Shashi’s conduct before and after her death became the stuff of nightly discussion. Cognizant of the position, that the registration of a FIR is not determinative of the conclusion of the investigation, the police decided to register a murder investigation. Television has however, blurred the distinction and has screamed blue murder.

As the cops are now forced to carefully sift through the events of a year ago, for possible evidence of a homicide, the question to be asked is this, does  the result of the investigation now have any chance of being perceived as fair? If the investigators find no evidence of an unlawful death, it will be seen as complicity or incompetence, but if on the other hand they do decide to file a chargesheet, the decision might well be seen as being guided by media perceptions or political pressure or both.

As murmurs of a trial by media, dictating the direction of an investigation grow louder, Tharoor’s lawyers may find the option of moving the courts for a ban on media overexposure, worth pondering. In 2012, a five judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court, in the case of Sahara Real Estate vs SEBI had approved temporary bans on media coverage, in cases where there is an apprehension of an infringement of the right to a fair trial. The court permits such applicants to “... seek an order of postponement of the offending publication/broadcast or postponement of reporting of certain phases of the trial (including identity of the victim or the witness or the complainant), and that the court may grant such preventive relief, on a balancing of the right to a fair trial and Article 19(1)(a) rights, bearing in mind the above mentioned principles of necessity and proportionality and keeping in mind that such orders of postponement should be for short duration and should be applied only in cases of real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice or to the fairness of trial”.

Tharoor’s lawyers may have not yet availed of this provision but if continued media coverage, dictates the course of investigation, an application may be soon forthcoming. A greater danger is of Parliament finally stepping in with legislation to place guidelines on media reporting. Even someone as respected as the late BG Verghese, had shortly before his death written a letter of complaint to the National Broadcasting Standards authority, which is the television industry’s voluntary ombudsman, complaining about the news industry’s tendency to sensationalise facts, and arrive at a premature adjudication ahead of investigators and courts.

The distress at overindulgence is apparent. While we all love a good murder mystery, we have little sympathy for miscreant purveyors of scandal. The fine line between fair reporting in the public interest and TRP-driven, unfair pandering to the public’s prurient interests, must not be obliterated. Justice lies, in allowing a speedy, scientific investigation to arrive at a logical conclusion uncaring of the present clamour and chaos of media coverage.