New Delhi, Jan 18- Sunanda Pushkar, 52, the flamboyant high-profile wife of minister of state for human resources development Shashi Tharoor was found dead in a Delhi five star hotel on a cold Friday evening. The cause of her death was being speculated hours after the door of room 345 at the Leela Hotel in Chanakyapuri, was broken down. But the run-up to sequence of events was played out so publicly, just 48 hours after her bitter cross-border Twitter fight with a Pakistani journalist, Mehr Tarar, 45, that it electrified India and displaced Rahul Gandhi’s shrill coronation outburst, from the headlines. Everything about Sunanda Pushkar and Shashi Tharoor in the past five years, it seemed, had a Twitter twist.
On Wednesday night, Sunanda sent a barrage of tweets from Shashi Tharoor’s Twitter handle where she accused Mehr Tarar of stalking her husband. The bizarre Twitter barrage prompted Tharoor, 57 who has over 20 lakh followers, to tweet that his account was hacked and was being temporarily taken down.
The Pushkar versus Tarar virtual war spilled over into the next morning with Pushkar repeatedly accusing Tarar of being an ISI agent. The Tharoors issued a joint statement a day later, to say that they were ‘happily married’ and intended to stay that way. Clearly, there was more to it and the circumstances leading to Sunanda Pushkar’s death will be discussed for decades.
Social media users called it the first ‘death by Twitter.’ Senior journalist Vir Sanghvi called it a ‘Princess Diana death’, the passing away of a glamorous personality in mysterious circumstances.
Some suspicion was fuelled by Tharoor’s former officer on special duty, Jacob Joseph, who tweeted “I am not her fan but I am sure as hell that she would never leave her son alone.” Just 16 hours before her death, Sunanda had replied to a Headlines Today journalist with this cryptic comment: “I know the truth for Indians is hard to handle one day Inshahalla.” But she had also posted a message that suggested she was ailing. “got so many issues diagnosed in KIMS that now who knows..”. (the Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi). But you could never tell that from her demeanour.
The flamboyant, erudite Tharoor who won the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat by over 1 lakh votes in May 2009, also held his own on social media. He introduced Indian politicians to the micro-blogging site even if he was at the receiving end for some insensitive comments about traveling in ‘cattle class’. In the real world, however, he was almost completely overshadowed by Sunanda Pushkar, a rare ministerial spouse in Delhi.
Vivacious, mercurial, outspoken, fiercely proud of her Kashmiri Pandit roots-her family left the Kashmir alley after their house was burnt down in 1990.
According to her close friend Suhel Seth, ‘the life of any party’. She was not one to take things lying down. In 2012, she publicly slapped a man for misbehaving with her in a crowd in Thiruvananthapuram airport.
She was also no stranger to controversy. In 2010, she was forced to surrender an estimated Rs.50 crore stake in the Kochi Tuskers IPL team after allegations of corruption. The expose came via a tweet. IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi tweeted that Sunanda Pushkar, then a marketing executive in Dubai and a close associate of Tharoor, had been gifted sweat equity worth Rs.70 crore in the new Kochi Tuskers IPL team that had been sold for Rs.1530 crores.
The scandal cost Tharoor his berth in the minister but he married Sunanda Pushkar later that year. It was a third marriage for both, but by any reckoning their most tempestuous and public one. In 2012, the couple was at the receiving end of a barb from Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who wondered about Tharoor’s ‘Rs.50 crore girlfriend.’ Tharoor who, with 20 lakh followers is the second most followed Indian politician on Twitter, shot back with a tweet, ‘my wife is priceless.’ That repartee may have come from the confidence of a dramatic return to the government, he was sworn in as minister of state for HRD in a reshuffle.
Six months ago, Delhi’s social circles were abuzz with rumors of a split between Tharoor and his wife. These died swiftly when the couple made several public appearances together.
Friends of Sunanda Pushkar however admit she ‘had issues with depression’ and was taking ‘anti-depressants’. That could have been the reason for some of her recent outbursts, including an unseemly altercation with a Khaleej Times journalist in Dubai on January 9, a little over a week before her death. In the course of the altercation with the journalist who was interviewing Tharoor, Sunanda even claimed to have thrown liquor at a prominent Indian TV anchor.
Hours after her public Twitter battle with the Pakistani journalist, Sunanda told a newspaper reporter that she was going to divorce Tharoor. Police say they found no suicide note in the hotel room or anything to suggest foul play. Thousands of twitter users meanwhile read and re-read one of her last message. “Hastay hua jayegay.’ Will go smiling.
-Indiatoday
