news details |
|
|
| Sunanda Pushkar's death - unanswered questions | | | Agencies
New Delhi, July 7: Just one question: Would you write to the judge hearing a matter you are vitally interested in, virtually telling him how to approach the material available in the case-file? You wouldn't. But in case you did, you would immediately open yourself to proceedings under the contempt law.
Now consider this. Within hours of the mysterious death of his third wife, Sunanda Pushkar, the junior HRD Minister, Shashi Tharoor, emailed the AIIMS doctor suggesting how he should go about writing her autopsy report. Mind you, here the husband was not writing the medical history of his loving, and living, wife who was being sent for a second opinion to another consultant. No. He was writing to the doctor who was to perform the post-mortem and all the necessary evidence lay in her limp and cold body. Nothing more was required.
Of course, Tharoor is an intelligent man, widely experienced in the ways of the world. It is highly unlikely that a person of his background did not know that writing to the forensic doctor ahead of the autopsy would be unethical. And that it would automatically arouse suspicion.
Whether or not the doctor who performed the autopsy took the hint is not so relevant now, as is the reason why the husband of the deceased felt obliged to do the unthinkable and sought to influence the doctor's findings. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the shock and horror of her death where did Tharoor, the loving husband, find the time and the will to email the AIIMS doctors?
There can only be one inference. Tharoor did not want the real cause of his wife's death to be revealed to the world. His anxiety to put a tight lid over the mystery naturally arouses deep suspicion. If Dr Sudhir Gupta, then head of the forensic medicine department of AIIMS, still went ahead and found that Sunanda died of unnatural causes, there must have been sound medical grounds to support that conclusion. The autopsy report found `poisoning' as the cause of death and over a dozen injury marks, clearly the tell-tale signs of a violent scuffle before her death.
Even the question as to why Dr Gupta has now raked up the charge that the then Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and Tharoor tried to `fix the autopsy report' is easily answered. Is it not enough that he recorded the genuine cause of her death despite the ministerial pressure? Did you want him to become a hero for a day by summoning the media to complain that he was sought to be pressurized by the ministers to doctor the post-mortem report? To expect even the AIIMS doctors to become the sacrificial lambs for satiating the desire of the long-suffering people in these cynical times, is most unrealistic.
As the news reports of the time testify, Dr Gupta's post-mortem report soon became public. Now, the Government tried another tack. A report was sought from a lab under the CBI in the expectation that it would nullify the AIIMS findings on Sunanda's death. Nearly six months after her death that report is still awaited.
The inference that even the CBI lab, despite its felt need to do the bidding of its then masters, found it hard to defy the scientific evidence was hard to escape. Given the overload of work, it is not unusual for the lab to take months to furnish the viscera report. But because it was Sunanda's viscera, because there was widespread public interest in her death, it was expected that it would give the report sooner than later. Besides, Tharoor, the Minister in the UPA Government till a couple of weeks ago, would be deeply interested, in the normal course, to learn conclusively about the real cause of her death.
But, it seems, he was relying on the short memory of the people, believing that the longer it takes for the viscera report to come, the less will be public interest in the mystery behind Sunanda's death. Unfortunately, the arrogance of the UPA Government helped revive the question: Who killed Sunanda and why? The order to demote Dr. Gupta three days before the change of guard in New Delhi persuaded him to challenge his demotion in the Central Administrative Tribunal.
Immediately, a host of questions surrounding her death in mid-January were back on the peoples' lips. The answer to the timing of Dr Gupta's revelation is straightforward. He has spoken when his refusal to toe the ministerial line has caused him personal hardship, something quite natural for normal human beings in similar situations to do.
We are sure that Subramanian Swamy, the thorn in the side of many a crook, has a list of his own unanswered questions for Tharoor. We can add a couple of them of our own. Whose money was it that bought as many as eleven plum flats in Dubai which stood in the name of Sunanda at the time of her death? A mid-level PR executive in a real estate firm in Dubai, how did she manage to invest Rs 110 crores? Could the reason for the silence of her family following her mysterious death lie in the inheritance of her assets in Dubai?
And, by the way, there is no evidence that the Tharoors had moved into the Leela Hotel, the favourite of most Mallu politicians, because their official house was being painted. The Lodi Road bungalow is maintained by the CPWD. And there is no record to show it was being painted. The fact is that there was a massive fight between the couple and Sunanda in a fit of rage moved out to the hotel - and to her death, as it most tragically turned out.
Now, if ever Tharoor gets down to answer a few inconvenient questions about Sunanda's death, we might want him to throw some light on another question which may not be directly linked to her death. Why and how he came to be nominated by Sonia Gandhi as India's candidate for the UN Secretary-General's post? He did not have a ghost's chance of winning, but that did not prevent the UPA Government to waste hundreds of crores of tax-payers' money on canvassing for him.
Was his candidature and his subsequent rise in the Congress somehow linked to the fact that the AICC too figured as one of the six odd Indian parties which had defied the UN sanction to conduct illicit business with Saddam Hussein in the infamous oil-for-food scam? The name of Natwar Singh appeared in the Paul Volcker inquiry report. But instead of naming names in the Congress Party, only AICC was mentioned. That was a great favour to those who control the Congress. Natwar Singh's political career was guillotined. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
