A week prior before Sunanda Pushkar, wife of senior Congress politician Shashi Tharoor had sent him an email, where she had written that ‘she has lost the will to live’. The Delhi police said in court today after submitting a 3,000-page charge-sheet that accuses the former UN secretary of abetting her suicide. Her mails and messages on social media have been taken as her “dying declaration”, the police told the court that will decide whether to summon Mr Tharoor as an accused in her mysterious death in 2014.
“I have no desire to live… all I pray for is death,” Sunanda Pushkar wrote in the email on January 8, nine days before she was found dead in her suite at a luxury hotel in Delhi, the charge-sheet reveals.
Her death, the court was told, was due to poisoning. Some 27 tablets of Alprax were found in her room but it is not clear how many she had. She was also said to be suffering from the auto-immune diseases, Lupus. The charge-sheet quotes a special investigation team as stating that Shashi Tharoor “as a husband ignored Sunanda when she was sliding or slipping into depression and she had Alprax.” They had frequent fights, it says, and “though injury marks were not serious, they are consistent with claims that the couple fought.” She had also been taking anti-depressants. She also publicly accused Tharoor of having an affair with Pakistani journalist and author, Mehr Tarar. Her death which happened barely few hours after her spat with Tarar, landed Tharoor further in the controversy.
“He ignored her calls and disconnected her calls in the days before her death,” the special probe team found. Sunanda Pushkar used social media to reach him, but those messages were also ignored, says the charge-sheet.
Sunanda and Shashi who married in 2010, had a huge row on a flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi two days before her death; the fight continued at the Delhi airport, the police said. She confided in her friends, who have reportedly revealed these details in their statements to the special investigation team. It was her second marriage, while it was the third marriage for Tharoor. Previously, they had been involved in an IPL controversy, where Sunanda was accused of being an benaami investor in ‘Kochi Tuskers Kerala’, the IPL team of Kerala. The public prosecutor said all the statements have been video recorded.
Shashi Tharoor, a parliamentarian from Kerala and a former Congress minister, has dismissed the charges of abetting his wife’s suicide as being “preposterous”.