Autopsy Turvy

Everyone seemed to have a prurient interest in the Twitter war that raged between Sunanda Pushkar, wife of former Union minister Shashi Tharoor, and Mehr Tarar, the Pakistani journalist whom the businesswoman-socialite suspected he was having an affair with. But the sinister twist came when she was found dead in the suite of a New Delhi hotel soon after. Six months down the line, one still doesn’t know whether she died naturally, killed herself, or was murdered. And if indeed it was the last, by whom and why.

There is only one man in the country—the BJP’s battering ram Dr Subramanian Swamy—who seems to know who the killers are but is loath to name them. He has written to the prime minister for a CBI inquiry into Sunanda Pushkar’s death.

The questions Swamy has raised certainly merit an answer. He asks, for instance, why the body was cremated in a hurry when the post-mortem spoke of unnatural death; why did Shashi Tharoor forward the opinion of his family physician to the doctor conducting the post-mortem; why were no investigations done on the 12 injury marks and injection mark recorded in the post-mortem report; and why was the investigation taking so long if not due to unwarranted pressure being exerted?

There is, of course, a counterpoint to each of his questions: that the body was handed over to the family because the viscera had already been preserved; Tharoor forwarded the e-mails six days after the post-mortem report was submitted; the injuries and abrasions mentioned in the report did not cause the death, hence did not merit investigation, and the delay in investigation is because the police are awaiting a fresh viscera report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL).

Uncharacteristically, though, Swamy gives Sunanda’s husband a clean chit. “Tharoor is aware of the murder and the motive,” he declared blithely in a television discussion, “but he himself is not involved.” He and others who suspect foul play in Sunanda’s death believe she was privy to details of money-laundering by political leaders in the Indian Premier League. She was about to spill the beans at a press conference, something Swamy says she had confided to a few journalists, and therefore had to be eliminated.

Which still doesn’t explain Tharoor’s recent behaviour perhaps. One of the very few UPA ministers and Congress MPs to get re-elected to the Lok Sabha this summer, he now appears as a man only too eager to mend fences with the new BJP-led dispensation. What else can explain his tweets praising the man who had once called his wife a ‘Rs 50 crore girlfriend’. Or his stamp of approval for HRD minister Smriti Irani, after meeting whom he tweeted what a pleasure it was to meet an “engaged and receptive” minister.

Tharoor, of course, is a chivalrous man. Even so, his conclusions appeared hasty and forced for a Congress MP to jump to, especially so soon after an election that annihilated his party.

But while he may be heaving a sigh of relief at Swamy’s exoneration of him, the controversy over Sunanda’s death hasn’t died. Resuscitating it was Dr Sudhir Gupta, head of the department of forensic science and toxicology at AIIMS, who on July 1 claimed that he was under pressure to act “unprofessionally” while finalising the post-mortem report. AIIMS director Dr M.C. Mishra and former Union health minister (and by virtue of that president of the institution) Ghulam Nabi Azad, he said, were the ones who pressurised him to produce “a tailor-made report”.

Gupta first levelled this allegation in an affidavit he filed on May 12—the day a doctor senior to him in the department, Dr O.P. Murty, was promoted as professor and so became the HoD. This decision, however, was stayed following Gupta’s complaint to the Central Administrative Tribunal, where he produced the two e-mails forwarded by Tharoor as evidence.

Rajeev Bhasin, the doctor whose e-mail Tharoor had forwarded, told Outlook that, saddened by the death of his gregarious patient, he had written the mail to Tharoor voluntarily. “On the day of the cremation, I gave Tharoor a hug and he said that he wished he had had the chance to contact me before this incident occurred,” says Dr Bhasin, a general practitioner based in New Delhi who had been treating Pushkar for a year-and-a-half before her death. “As I had no chance to talk to him or to convey my condolences, I spontaneously wrote an e-mail a few days later. Is it wrong for a family doctor to discuss the case of his patient, whose death was ‘unnatural’, with her husband and family?”

Attempts to interfere in the preparation of autopsy reports are rare, say several doctors, both past and present, associated with AIIMS. “Dr Gupta himself had constituted the panel of doctors to conduct the post-mortem,” says a source at the institute. “If he felt there was pressure being exerted on him at any point, he ought to have approached the medical superintendent immediately rather than talk about it six months later,” says an AIIMS doctor with 20 years’ standing.

The autopsy report was handed over two days later, as the intervening day (January 19) was a Sunday. Sources present in the office during the handing over of the report say that Dr Gupta, at his sole discretion, invited the sub-divisional magistrate and the additional commissioner of police to the office of the AIIMS director and delivered the report in a “sealed envelope” himself.

This is also not the first time that Dr Gupta’s credibility has come into question. In a document dated February 8, 2010, he admitted before the then deputy director (admn), AIIMS, to have written a letter on his official letterhead to the president of the Jammu & Kashmir Bar Association against the post-mortem report submitted by Dr T.D. Dogra, the then head of the forensic department, in the Shopian case. He did so, as per his own admission, without being “aware about the contents of the case” and without pursuing “any medical evidence produced by Dr Dogra”. When Outlook contacted Dr Dogra, he refused to speak on the Sunanda case but gave insights on post-mortem examinations in general (see interview).

Other forensic science experts Outlook spoke to found several discrepancies in the post-mortem report. They say, for instance, that the post-mortem did not establish nor refute the fact that Sunanda had Lupus. She had been examined at the Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences between January 12 and January 14. Three days later she was dead.

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Unfolding Of A Tragedy

Jan 17 Sunanda Pushkar, 52, found dead
Jan 18 Post-mortem conducted, body handed over to family and cremated
Jan 20 Post-mortem report submitted
Jan 26 Shashi Tharoor forwards two e-mails to director, AIIMS
Mar 2014 CFSL report says no trace of poison found in the viscera
May 2014 CFSL forms a committee to re-examine the viscera
May 12 Promotion of Dr O.P. Murty as professor approved
May 12 Dr Sudhir Gupta challenges Murty’s promotion in CAT and alleges he was being sidelined due to his refusal to act unprofessionally while writing Sunanda’s post-mortem report
Jul 1 Dr Gupta claims he stands by his report
Jul 3 Subramanian Swamy calls for a CBI inquiry

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Sunanda Pushkar
Socialite, businesswoman, wife of Shashi Tharoor

Accident or homicide?

Went through thorough medical examination at Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) between January 12 and January 14
KIMS confirmed she was suffering from auto-immune disorder Lupus, but not any life-threatening disease
But three days later, she was found dead, sprawled on the bed in a hotel suite, where the couple had checked in allegedly because their house was being painted
A strong-willed, opinionated woman of independent means, it is thought unlikely she’d take her own life without leaving a suicide note
Natural death, accident or homicide are the possibilities still being explored

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Dr Sudhir Gupta
Head of the Department, Forensic Medicine, AIIMS (till June 2014)

Was the post-mortem report botched up ?

Claims he was pressurised to act ‘unprofessionally’ by then Union health minister and AIIMS director
But stands by post-mortem report he handed over to SDM
Report speaks of ‘sudden, unnatural death’
It also talks of drug overdose and poisoning but does not say they caused the death
The report also finds abrasions and injury marks and mark of a tooth bite on her palm. Injuries caused by a ‘blunt’ object, it claims, but holds that the injuries were not related to the death.