Man In The Shadow

The mirror has cracked from side to side for Shashi Tharoor, that suave writer, diplomat, politician known for flicking back his hair and talking in a polished accent. He has walked, talked and tweeted his way out of many scandals and even a few scams in the past. But the strange case of the death of his third wife Sunanda Pushkar exactly a year ago seems set to stalk him. The dead do tell some tales, it seems. Now the police is acting on an autopsy report that suggests possible traces of a lethal poison called Polonium-210 in her body. After a great deal of confusion, we now know a year after the death that it’s not sparkling cyanide or a fit of rage that killed her but perhaps a poison we’ve heard of only in high-profile international murders. The case has certainly moved into the zone of mysteries that otherwise inhabit the world of fiction. It is Agatha Christieland out there in the case that swirls around Tharoor: beautiful women, dead beautiful woman, body in a lush hotel, a famous husband (him), suggestions of scandal and personal indiscretions, untraceable poison.

This correspondent had exactly two encounters with the once-famous couple—Shashi and Sunanda—who walked hand in hand smiling and being photographed. It was after the famous marriage in 2010, when Page 3 was being decorated with photographs of the two. They walked in like a teenage couple in love to a winter lunch hosted by then Union minister Salman Khurshid and his wife Louise. There were many notables present that day on the Lutyens bungalow lawns but all eyes were on the lady, who sported a cowgirl look, with knee-high boots and a check shirt. She was charming, warm, gushing, pulling her husband’s arm, jaan come here, jaan let’s go there. Constantly searching out one another, they were definitely a novelty in the world of staid middle-class couples, let alone politicians who would never dream of making a public display of spousal affection.

Meeting number two took place at the residence of the French ambassador in Delhi in 2012, where this correspondent was on the panel to discuss Tharoor’s latest book, Pax Indica. Tharoor was eloquent as usual. Sunanda sat in the front row, furiously tweeting her husband’s words, minute by minute. At the cocktail afterwards, she was quite delighted with his performance. Again, charming, gushing, very anxious to make an impression, exchange numbers with the guests who were politely trying to not just stare at her.

Hyderabad ire Protest against Tharoor, Lalit Modi over IPL

That’s how the couple lived for the four highly publicised years of their marriage: beautifully turned out, from cocktail party to book launch, tweeting away nuggets of a life they tried to variously project as glamorous, meaningful, beautiful, happening and surrounded by the halo of true love. Indeed, Shashi would in his book dedication describe Sunanda as the greatest love of his life. The Sunanda-Shashi story truly is a fit case for the use of cliches—life would be stranger than fiction, cocktail season would turn into a morbid cocktail and what have you. Given the kind of hysterics that preceded Sunanda’s death in a seven-star hotel, one can indeed say that it was a long hangover, the crash after the party has pooped, a mercurial change that happens when people seek great highs after which they hit the lows.

That day too, on January 17, 2014, this correspondent had sighted Shashi Tharoor at the AICC session in Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium. He was smiling, nodding at a few journalists, and seen walking over to greet Sonia Gandhi. He did not look like a man who was in the midst of high drama on the personal front (if there is indeed any such reliable look) or knew that his wife would be dead soon. But if this was actually a Christie murder mystery, one could say he was setting up the greatest alibi of all: being seen by hundreds of people at a public event in Delhi even as someone was possibly injecting Polonium-210 into his wife. According to Tharoor’s version of events, he would return to the hotel after the AICC meet and find Sunanda dead.

This is how the sequence of events leading up to the fateful day goes: Tharoor had struck up a friendship with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar. Sunanda suspected him of having an affair and confided to friends and suggested in interviews that she would expose him and blow the lid. They boarded a flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi on January 15 and fought all the way through in the aircraft and at Delhi airport (Tharoor was then minister of state in the HRD ministry). Then I&B minister Manish Tewari was also a witness to the mid-air fracas as were other passengers.

Full circle Tweeted pic on travelling “cattle class”, doing his bit for Swachh Bharat and with Sonia Gandhi at an iftaar party

In Delhi, a distraught and hysterical Sunanda refused to go home and checked into the Leela hotel. Tharoor has also admitted to investigators that there were a few “scuffles” between him and his wife. They were apparently fighting non-stop for three days. Tharoor followed her into the hotel the next day and they again proceeded to fight through the night apparently. In the morning, he left for the AICC session; she went to sleep. At some point, she died or was killed. This was the sad end to the woman Narendra Modi had described as the “50 crore girlfriend”. Tharoor had then responded that Sunanda was “priceless”. It was a very smart response then.

What was not so smart in hindsight is the pressure Tharoor reportedly sought to bring on the forensic laboratory at aiims. This is where Crime Scene Investigation meets Agatha Christie. According to the head of the forensic unit Sudhir Gupta (see interview), political pressure was brought on him to declare the death as a natural one after he had indicated “unnatural and sudden death” in his first report. Gupta was not willing to go along, hence was sidelined and Sunanda speedily cremated. Before that, however, the viscera (body tissue) was kept in preservative and detailed photographs taken of the injuries on her body that included bite marks and needle punctures. Now, Gupta has been rehabilitated and the police is acting on the presumption that Sunanda was poisoned.

What now of Shashi Tharoor? A small group around him speaks of political vendetta by the BJP. Perhaps. But the reality is that the most revealing tales about the MP now come from his own Congress party. Always seen as an outsider who got grafted in at the top level, salacious tales about him are known to his party colleagues. To add to the famous Twitter row between Sunanda and Mehr Tarar the day before the former’s death, sources say more than one woman has fought and gotten hysterical over Tharoor. There is a tale involving a Kerala-based actress he was involved with before he moved on to Sunanda. Apparently, she was so fiercely jealous that she tried to stop an attractive  woman MP from Mumbai from going to his room for a professional purpose. The MP would later apparently complain to president Sonia Gandhi. Then, during his days as a UN diplomat, Tharoor had got involved with the wife of an Indian ambassador that culminated in the couple getting a divorce. There is no moral judgement to be made on Tharoor’s life, and many brilliant men have a great appetite for women. But all this assumes relevance because his late third wife was apparently hysterical because of this.

In Kerala, the joke is that political opponents are more afraid of Tharoor’s ability to charm women than any other accomplishment of his. One rival party that was putting up a candidate against him in Thiruvananthapuram apparently denied a ticket to a beautiful lady candidate because they feared that instead of fighting Tharoor she would fall for him! The ticket went to a relatively dull male candidate who Tharoor defeated by a narrow lead.

Tharoor’s many loves & lives: Mehr Tarar, Sunanda, Tilottama Mukherjee and Christa Giles

Ever since he became one of the 44 Congress candidates to survive the Modi onslaught in the 2014 general election, Tharoor has been trying to flirt not with women but with the BJP. He has said nice things about Narendra Modi in articles and on Twitter and showed solidarity with his Swachh Bharat mission. He caught the broom, it is now being said, not to clean India but to soften the BJP regime and ensure that any scandal remained firmly swept under the carpet. The BJP, however, does not seem to be either wooed or flattered and will possibly view Tharoor as damaged goods. He will certainly face further investigation at the very least for trying to tamper with evidence.

Shashi Tharoor, the talented writer, has got lost in all the scandals, the scams. One of the conspiracy theories doing the rounds in Delhi actually links the IPL scam to the death of his wife. The version, now also appearing in some Hindi dailies, goes something like this. Sunanda Pushkar was from Dubai where she met Tharoor. The couple, who once owned an IPL team (that was later removed from the league), also had other contacts in Dubai. Sunanda had started to act unstable and talk in interviews about revealing some great secrets. This worried others too, besides being very inconvenient for Tharoor. Her death therefore was a professional hit by unknown men who checked into the same hotel where she was staying.

Tharoor, meanwhile, is not a public personality who evokes sympathy. He is seen as too elitist, too clever by half. His remarks, like the one about flying “cattle class”, endeared him to no one except the thin crust of people who revel in their sense of privilege, and certainly inappropriate for a politician presuming to represent the toiling masses of India. As a minister, he once tried to stay in a five-star hotel and get the government to pick up his tab (after it became another scandal he found himself a house). He is perceived as being snooty and way too smooth.

On the flip side, he’s a talented writer, very courteous in his speech, and one of the current members of the Congress who has both written and spoken most elegantly about the Nehruvian legacy. It’s actually a little startling to realise that between writing 14 books and doing well at both fiction and non-fiction, lurching from cocktail to book event, he also found the time to put out nearly 25,000 tweets (since he joined Twitter in 2009 he has one of the highest number of followers for an Indian at 2.8 million). At the time of writing on January 8, he had not tweeted for three days.

For tweeting is as significant a reality in the life of Shashi Tharoor, 58, as all his many other engagements. There’s something so unreal about the life of Shashi Tharoor once he crosses 50. He began with a keen talent and intelligence that saw him make his way to the top of the UN bureaucracy. He was then audacious enough to enter mass politics in India and succeed. He wrote books that sold well and the latest—India Shastra—is about to fly of the shelves. It’s a 473-page tome, where he’s already analysed the Modi regime, and then moved on to an analysis of ideas that govern India, colonialism and so on. This book has been dedicated to his grandmother and mother. The “greatest love of his life” is no more.

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A Question Of Answers: Suicide, Murder, Accident Or A Frame-Up?

• Since May 2014, the investigating officer on the case, Atul Sood, has been transferred; ACP Surinder Sharma, who was supervising the investigation, retired in September, and the DCP concerned was shifted to the traffic department

• Delhi police is yet to examine or record the statement of BJP leader Dr Subramanian Swamy by a magistrate. Swamy claims to have proof that Sunanda Pushkar was killed but says the needle of suspicion goes beyond Tharoor.

• Delhi Police Commissioner told the media that a case for murder was registered because the final report from AIIMS held that the death was ‘homicidal’ in nature. The forensic science department head Dr Sudhir Gupta denies this and told the media that the report says that death was by poisoning and that it was for the police to find out if the death was suicidal, homicidal or accidental.

• The Police holds that it is investigating whether the poison was administered orally or was injected. (The only way it can be established is for someone to come forward and testify how it was administered.)

• Police claims that the medical report mentions that the deceased suffered from no prior disease and had no cardiac problem, hypertension or tuberculosis. This is contested by a member of the forensic team, who confirms that she did suffer from Lupus, an autoimmune disease.

• While Shashi Tharoor spoke to the Delhi Police Commissioner on November 9, 2014, and followed it up with a letter on November 12 to complain that his domestic help, Narayan Singh, was beaten up by the police and pressured into saying that he and Tharoor had killed Pushkar, the police commissioner announced to the media in January that he had spoken to his officers and that they had told him the charge was baseless.

• AIIMS had submitted a revised report in September but Delhi police was not satisfied; it asked AIIMS to answer some more questions. Sources in AIIMS claim all the reports submitted by them on the death so far, four according to one estimate and more according to others, have reiterated ‘by and large’ the same findings.

• The ‘final’ medical report submitted by AIIMS on December 29 is believed to have recorded that traces of acetaminophen, caffeine, cotinine and ethyl alcohol were found in the viscera but no trace of Alprax was found although two strips of the anti-depressant were found by the bedside.

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The Rise And Slide Of Shashi Tharoor

• 1956 Born in London to Lily and Chandran Tharoor, an ad executive for The Statesman, Calcutta

• 1975 At St Stephen’s College in Delhi, where he did his BA in History, edits the magazine Kooler Talk

• 1976 The debater and quizzer wins college elections with the slogan ‘Shashi Tharoor, jeetega zaroor’

• 1978 The youngest to complete a PhD in diplomacy from Tufts University, Massachusetts, begins UN career

• 1989 Becomes senior officer at UN; publishes his take on the Mahabharata, The Great Indian Novel

• 1997 Becomes executive assistant to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan

• 2006 Lobbied hard with a reluctant UPA government to back him as India’s candidate for the top UN post

• 2007 Becomes president of Afras Ventures, a Dubai firm promoting foreign investment

• 2007 Marries UN colleague Christa Giles after split with Tilottama Mukherjee, with whom he has twins Kanishk and Ishaan

• 2009 Enters Indian politics, joins Congress and is elected to 15th Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram

• 2009 Meets Sunanda Pushkar at a soiree in Dubai hosted by billionaire businessman of Kerala origin, Sunny Varkey

• 2009 Stays in a star hotel as minister during “austerity drive”, saying Kerala House didn’t have a gym or privacy; tweets pictures about travelling “cattle class”

• 2010 Allegedly leans in on external affairs ministry to buy three books authored by him for distribution in Indian missions

• 2010 Calls Saudi Arabia a valuable interlocutor between India and Pakistan during PM’s visit to Jeddah

• 2010 Lalit Modi discloses names of some of the owners of the Cochin IPL franchise, including Sunanda Pushkar’s
• 2010 Sends SMS to Karan Thapar: “I’ve seen your grilling of Farooq, putting words in his mouth and I’ve just realised what a s**t you are”

• 2010 Uproar in Parliament over IPL leads to Tharoor’s resignation as minister of state for external affairs

• 2010 Divorces Christa Giles, marries Sunanda Pushkar, backs P.J. Thomas’s appointment as CVC

• 2011 Tweets “Amul babies are fit, strong, focused on future” after Kerala CM calls Rahul Gandhi an “Amul baby”

• 2011 CAG says Tharoor received $30,000 in Dubai account for Commonwealth Games “services”

• 2012 After Modi calls Sunanda a “Rs 50 crore girlfriend”, Tharoor responds: “Wife Priceless”

• 2014 Subramanian Swamy alleges Tharoor misused his office to get Pushkar’s son out of a UAE jail

• 2014 Sunanda Pushkar in a Twitter blowout with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, who she alleges is having an affair with Tharoor

• 2014 Pushkar and Tharoor issue a joint statement, but she is found dead the following evening after a series of conversations with TV journalists through the night

• 2014 Draws Congress fire for online article ‘How Narendra Modi may have evolved into Modi 2.0’

• 2014 Modi nominates Tharoor as one of his ambassadors for ‘Swachh Bharat’ campaign; Congress sacks him as spokesperson

By Saba Naqvi with Minu Ittyipe