Of Sunanda Pushkar, Shashi Tharoor and murder controversy

Nearly a year after Sunanda Pushkar, the wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, died under mysterious circumstances in a five star hotel room, the Delhi Police have registered a case of murder, saying she had been poisoned and that had resulted in her unnatural death. However no one has been named in the FIR so far.

Born to a Kashmiri Pandit family of landlords and Army officers, Dubai-based Sunanda Pushkar was popular face in social circles. She first came into the limelight because of her relationship with Congress leader Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor, 52, and Sunanda, 44, met for the first time in 2008 at the Imperial awards function in New Delhi and what began as friendship, soon turned into love.

In 2010 Pushkar found herself accused of owning sweat equity worth Rs 700 million in Rendezvous Sports World, a member of the consortium that won the Kochi Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise. Pushkar had to relinquish her stake in the team after then IPL commissioner Lalit Modi revealed the ownership pattern of Kochi IPL. She went on to say that she was no proxy for Tharoor and she was "outraged at the distortions and outright lies about me, my background and my life that have appeared in the press".

The Kochi Tuskers controversy also forced Tharoor to resign as Minister of State for Human Resource Development in the Union Cabinet, telling parliament he had done "nothing improper or unethical let alone illegal".

Soon after, the couple got married in a private ceremony in the year 2010 at Tharoor's home town, Eavanchery, Kerala. This was the third marriage for both Tharoor and Pushkar and their children from previous marriages were in attendance at the nuptials.

Sunanda continued making appearances at social gatherings, in the company of well-known socialites and celebrities. Three years into the marriage, rumours started to grow that Pushkar and Tharoor's marital life was far from blissful.

The scandal erupted into the public domain in the most bizarre manner when Pushkar posted a series of intimate messages on January 16, 2014, supposedly sent by Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar to Tharoor, using her husband's Twitter account. The controversial tweets thrust the couple into the middle of a media storm.

Tharoor tried to downplay the incident by stating that his account had been hacked. However, his wife added a new twist to the tale by claiming she had used Tharoor's Twitter account to expose his alleged relationship with Mehr and further accused the Pakistani journalist of stalking her husband.Pushkar went on to add that despite being aware of the alleged relationship, she had avoided going public during the elections since she was trying to save her marriage.After the Twitter controversy and shortly before her death, Pushkar stated she had taken upon herself "the crimes of this man [read Shashi Tharoor] during IPL".

There were some late attempts at damage control, with the couple issuing a joint statement to media saying they were distressed by an "unseemly controversy" over some "unauthorized tweets" posted from their Twitter accounts and that both were "happily married and intend to remain that way". The statement claimed that "distorted accounts" of comments "allegedly made by Sunanda", alleging an affair between her husband and a Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar had "led to some erroneous conclusions".

The same note also stated that Pushkar had been hospitalised after being ill, and was under medication and advised rest.On January 17, 2014 came the shocking news that Pushkar had been found dead in her hotel room at the Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.According to media reports, Tharoor discovered his wife was dead after she did not wake up from her sleep in the evening. The initial reports suggested that Sunanda committed suicide. Police investigators found two strips of Alprax drug from her hotel room.

The case witnessed several twists and turns before reports of an unnatural death started doing the rounds. The preliminary autopsy report prepared by doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences revealed injury marks on Pushkar's body, stating that the injuries may or may not have been the cause of death.

The autopsy suggested that Pushkar had died of drug overdose, most likely a combination of sedatives, and other strong medicines. Even in these testing times, Sunanda's family stood by Tharoor, who along with her son, cremated her body at the Lodhi Crematorium in South Delhi.Several startling revelations followed, with some reports even claiming that Pushkar had hinted about her death to some of her close friends during the last few conversations and messages that she exchanged with them.AIIMS in its final post mortem report on Sunanda Pushkar to the Delhi police on September 30, 2014, reiterated their finding in the preliminary report that the cause of death was poisoning.