Two years on, Sunanda death still a mystery

The Delhi Police has been unable to make any significant breakthrough in the death of Sunanda Pushkar, who passed away under unexplained circumstances at a five-star hotel near Chanakyapuri two years ago. Pushkar was married to Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. 

BJP leader Subramanian Swami has threatened to file a Public Interest Litigation in the Delhi High Court next week to force the police to register Pushkar’s death as a murder case. Detectives say that it is difficult to establish that Sunanda had been murdered and that an overdose of Alprax, which was perhaps consumed accidentally, could have been the cause according to them.

Delhi Police commissioner B.S. Bassi reiterated on Friday that Sunanda Pushkar’s death was due to “unnatural causes” i.e. due to a possible overdose of Alprax.

However, ever since Sunanda’s body was discovered at the hotel, doubts were raised over the line of investigation adopted by the police. Instead of probing the death as a case of possible homicide the police allowed a magisterial inquest into the circumstances using the clause “pertaining to the death of a woman in less than seven years of marriage”.

Sunanda and Shashi had been married for three years, and both had been married twice before. The magisterial inquest did not yield any positive results but only delayed the investigations further. It was more than a year and a half ago that a team of doctors concluded that Sunanda had died due to “unnatural causes”. There have been allegations against the Delhi Police that they allowed powerful sections within the Congress government to try and influence the course of investigation. In this context, a couple of police officers dealing with the matter were singled out for the alleged lapse in the investigation process.