THE CASE OF THE RECKLESS ROMEO

Perry Mason novels were a childhood favourite. The intriguing cases, the beautiful defendants, the painstaking investigations, and finally the courtroom drama in which Mason dramatically turns the tables on the prosecution to secure the release of his client... They have all the ingredients of a pot-boiler. No wonder many a Perry Mason novel by his creator Erle Stanley Gardner ended up as absorbing TV plays. Many thrillers by other authors, featuring Perry Mason as the central character, also made it to the screens. One such story was The Case of the Reckless Romeo, 

telecast in the US in 1992.

The story bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Sunanda Pushkar case, which I am about to narrate. But then, the title could fit her husband Shashi Tharoor like a glove. And so I have used it here. 

Let us take a quick peek.

He : Born in 1956. Handsome. Suave. Flamboyant. Educated. A man of letters, who began writing with a regular column on Foreign Affairs in THE ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY OF INDIA. Rich. A junior minister in the Congress-led UPA government after a successful career in India’s foreign service. Twice married and twice divorced, with a roving eye for beauty. Snotty. Condescending and snobbish to the extent of publicly proclaiming that flying in the Economy section was “cattle class”...  

She : Born in 1962. Glamorous. Glitzy. Rich. Ambitious. A social climber using her undeniable charm to penetrate elitist fortresses. Twice married and twice divorced. All ready for a third engagement with matrimony, provided the terms were right...

When they met, they felt they were made for each other. A dream, year-long courtship, almost entirely before media flashlights, ended in their marriage in 2010. Sunanda Pushkar became Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor.

Theirs was a dream alliance.

Man and Wife were inseparable. Like Mary's little lamb, wherever Sunanda went, Shashi went. He hardly ever left her alone. They could often be spotted walking hand in hand or Sunanda possessively caressing Shashi’s hair or unabashedly pecking him on the cheek. His friends admired these juvenile demonstrations. And his critics chided him by saying Shashi Tharoor ought to have been made the minister of ‘love affairs’.

The couple’s idyllic world, however, turned sour and on January 17, 2014, Sunanda Pushkar was found dead in a suite in the Leela Palace Hotel in Delhi under mysterious circumstances. 

A few months earlier, reports had surfaced that the Shashi-Sunanda marriage was heading towards disaster after Mehr Tarar, a beautiful Pakistani journalist, whom Sunanda termed an ISI agent, entered Tharoor’s life. Domestic helps and close friends talked about frequent verbal and sometimes physical spats between Shashi and Sunanada on Mehr Tarar's account. In fact, even though the couple had flown in together to Delhi a day before her death, they had bitterly fought over Tarar on the flight (Sunanda had even locked herself into the flight toilet, much to the amusement and chagrin of fellow travellers) and later in the airport. As a result they had chosen not to go to their plush Lodhi Estate home. They had instead come to Leela Palace separately and checked into separate rooms. After hours of confabulations, which involved some common friends, the couple finally put out a joint statement to scotch rumours that their marriage was on the rocks. They claimed that all differences had been resolved and they were again “happily married”. Thereafter, they shifted jointly to Suite number 345.

During the rest of their stay, Shashi Tharoor kept himself out of her hair by “busying” himself with party affairs, while Sunanda was left pretty much to herself with a domestic help, Narayan Singh, at hand to attend to personal needs.

On the fateful day, Tharoor returned at around 8 PM from an AICC meeting, only to find his wife lying dead in their hotel room. More than an hour later, he informed the Delhi police about his wife’s death. The police recovered the body from the hotel and sent it for autopsy. According to initial reports, Sunanda was suspected to have committed suicide. Later reports stated that the cause of death was “unnatural”. Dr Adarsh Kumar, who was part of the AIIMS team that conducted the post mortem, told the media that Sunanda’s arms had injury marks that appeared to have been caused by a “blunt instrument. Sources added that there was a bite mark on the left hand and several blue coloured contusions on her right hand, which could not have been self-inflicted. Yet the doctors, in all their wisdom, said these injuries may or may not be the cause of death. The autopsy report indicated that she died of drug overdose, most likely a combination of sedatives, other strong medicines and probably alcohol. Strips of Alprax, an anti-depressant, was found in her purse as well as in the room. This led the investigators to suspect that a suicidal overdose of this could have led to her death.

In a statement to investigators, Shashi Tharoor said : "Our married life was very happy and some misunderstanding which was there was cleared and she was happy about it." He also revealed that his wife was "a very happy personality" but was very ill after two surgeries. She was dependent on Alprax tablets to sleep, he said. Days before her death, Pushkar had been admitted to a hospital in Kerala for suspected lupus. Tharoor said she was discharged on January 14,  2014, after which they came to Delhi. In his statement to the magistrate, Tharoor claimed he had gone to Jaipur that day, and had come back to the hotel at 8 PM.  

"I decided to wake up Sunanda at 8.30 PM. I entered the bedroom of the suite asking 'darling how are you feeling,' there was no reply. I placed my hand on her forehead to check for fever and found it very cold. Her hands were stiff. I immediately called the doctors and the hotel management. But it was already too late."

Doctors at Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences in Trivandrum, who had examined her a few days earlier however claimed that Sunanda did not have any serious health problems, thereby raising serious doubts about the truthfulness of Tharoor’s claims. 

On 1 July 2014, the controversy over her death deepened when AIIMS doctor Sudhir Gupta, who headed the team that conducted the post mortem on Sunanda’s body claimed that he was pressured "by top officials" to submit a false report in the case to the effect that Sunanda died a "natural death". He claimed that he was being targeted because he did not bow to the pressure and gave a report stating that Sunanda's death was caused by drug poisoning that could be either suicidal or homicidal. Dr Gupta claimed he was prevented from telling the truth in his report due to Shashi Tharoor and Ghulam Nabi Azad's influence. In order to prove that the autopsy report was influenced, Dr Gupta has also submitted details of emails exchanged between the AIIMS director and Tharoor, thereby implying that the “top official” he had referred to was the Director himself.

Shashi Tharoor, however, maintained that he has, since the beginning, not created any obstacle in the investigation process. He said that he was cooperating fully with the police fulfilling all the formalities that are required by the investigation authorities.

On October 10, 2014 the medical team probing Sunanda’s death concluded that she had died of poisoning. On November 10, the hotel room, where she was found dead and which had been locked under the seal of the Delhi Police, was re-examined by police and forensic experts. Police officials claimed that during this examination, they had stumbled upon fluid marks on the bed and the carpet and a broken glass in suite number 345 of Leela Palace hotel. How such tell-tale evidences could have been ignored in the first place is not clear and would definitely weaken the police case when it comes before a court for trial.

Forensic experts inform that the stains on the bed linen and carpet had been caused by urine. These coupled with the injuries on Sunanda’s body and some tell-tale prick-marks on her hands indicate a violent struggle and forced injection of a poison. The viscera report that was filed recently also indicated the presence of a rare poison forcing the forensic authorities to send viscera samples to Scotland Yard for a detailed analysis to identify the specific poison.

On January 6, 2015 Delhi Police reported that Sunanda was murdered and filed an FIR in the regard. 

Less than a week later, maverick politician and senior BJP leader Subramanium Swamy claimed that she had been administered a Russian poison which was unknown to Indian forensic experts. He stated that Sunanda's husband Tharoor was a part of the murder conspiracy. Adding to the string of accusations against Tharoor, Swamy challenged him to reveal the identity of the 'killers' to the police.The BJP leader also accused Tharoor of trying to cover up his wife's murder as a natural death. Giving a totally new twist to the sordid story, Swamy claimed that Sunanda had been put to death as she had wanted to tell the truth about some dubious dealings in the IPL. "Priyanka Gandhi’s husband, Robert Vadra's name would also have surfaced," he said.

Suddenly the case assumed new dimensions. What was once believed to be a straight forward suicide by the wife of a reckless Romeo has become a cause célèbre with political and financial ramifications. Which leads us to the questions : What was Sunanda’s Pushkar’s connection with IPL cricket? What was the damaging information she could have made public?  Who wanted to suppress the information so desperately as to warrant silencing her on a permanent basis? And in what way could Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law be linked to the whole sordid drama?

I shall go into these issues in my next post.

THE YEAR THAT WAS... THE YEAR THAT WILL BE...

For any rational being, the First of January is just another number. Just another day in the continuum. A small dot between birth and death. It is no different from the 31^st of December; or for that matter from the 5^th of March...

But then, human beings are not wholly rational. We like to compartmentalise things. And so the 1^st of January assumes significance. It is the first day of the New Year. And, therefore, the 365 days prior to that constitute the Old Year. Once we accept this fact, then a whole new meaning is added to the day. It becomes a day of stock-taking of events past. It becomes a day of hope as we look with anticipation at the kaleidoscope of events that would unfurl before us over the next 365 days...

Having occupied a ring-side seat to political happenings in Tamilnadu for well over three decades, I shall confine this blog to political happenings in Tamilnadu in 2014 and what could be in store in 2015. Since I firmly believe in the law of karma, my task is rendered a little easier. For, I strongly believe the events to unfold will certainly be the reactions to, or consequence of the actions that have taken place in the past.

The people of Tamilnadu will remember 2014 as the year of extremes for one of the towering personalities of the decade – the supremo of the AIADMK party, J Jayalalithaa, popularly referred to as Amma. In the month of May, she led the AIADMK party, contesting without any alliance, to a resounding, unprecedented victory, winning 37 of the 39 seats in Tamilnadu. It was apparent that the spectre of the 2G scam authored by Andimuthu Raja still haunted the DMK party, just as it had during the 2011 Assembly elections.

But Jayalalithaa’s hour of glory did not bring her the happiness she had prayed and hoped for. What would have suited the AIADMK supremo more would have been a hung Parliament scenario, where, with her party’s strength she could have bargained for some plum portfolios for her party including, maybe the Deputy Prime ministership, if not the Prime ministership, for herself. But, alas, that was not to be. As the BJP surged clearly ahead of the mid-way mark, Jayalalithaa’s mammoth victory just became a statistics.

The next important development that took place last year was on September 27^th. The case of disproportionate assets against Jayalalithaa and three others based on a complaint filed by Subramaniam Swamy on June 14^th, 1996, after 18 long years of twists and turns, finally came up for judgement at a special court in Bangalore. The Tamilnadu Chief Minister arrived in a pompous cavalcade at the court of John Michael de Cunha, a lowly magisterial-level judge. Before entering the court hall, she is said to have informed her driver to keep the vehicle’s AC running as she expected to come out in five minutes. But ironically, five hours later, she was escorted amid high security to the adjoining prison to serve a prison sentence of four years. She had been found guilty of the charges made out against her. Following the conviction, she was automatically stripped of her chief ministership. The Judge also ordered her to pay a fine of Rs 100 Crores. An unprecedented sentence, an unprecedented fine and an unprecedented event in Indian politics of an all powerful chief minister of a state being ignominiously imprisoned in a neighbouring state!!

Interestingly, Jayalalithaa’s conviction and imprisonment did not bring any cheer to the rival DMK party, which had been decimated in the earlier state elections and parliamentary elections. 2G’s Damocle’s sword still hangs over the heads of the DMK’s propaganda secretary and former Union Telecom Minister A Raja, Kanimozhi, DMK Supremo M Karunanidhi’s daughter by his third wife, and Karunanidhi’s second wife Dayalu.

Which brings us to what 2015 has in store.

Jayalalithaa, who is out on bail, has filed her appeal before the Karnataka High Court and a verdict is expected by March, 2015. Her fate literally hangs on a balance. Let us look at the various options before her :

1.      

         1. The trial court verdict is overturned and the High Court sets her free : This is the best thing that can happen to Jayalalithaa. It would enable her to contest a by-election and return to the helm of affairs as Chief Minister to lead her party from the front during the next Assembly elections which are due in 2016. But given the tough stand taken by the Supreme Court on the issue of political corruption and the even tougher contents of de Cunha’s judgement order, the High Court taking a contrary view in such a high profile case, which is being watched by all, appears unlikely. Subramaniam Swamy, the original complainant and the DMK party, which impleaded itself in the case through its general secretary, K Anbazhagan, are unlikely to let Jayalalithaa have things her way.

2.          2. The trial court judgement is upheld but the sentence is reduced : If the High Court indulges in tokenism and reduces the imprisonment by a year, it would do Jayalalithaa no good, as she still would have to go to prison and she would stay debarred from elections for a further  6 years. If, on the other hand, the sentence is reduced to a year, then Jayalalithaa stands a decent chance to come back to head the campaign for the next assembly elections. However, she will again have a tough decision to make. Whether to make an appeal or not. If she does not go on appeal, then she might have to serve out her sentence in jail. The experience could be nerve-shattering for one who has lived her life on the lap of the luxury. On the other hand, if she goes on appeal, the ban on her contesting elections would continue till the appeal is decided and this could well be after the next assembly elections...

3.         3. The trial court judgement and sentence is upheld : This would effectively bring the curtains down on Jayalalithaa’s political career. Four years in jail, followed by a six year ban would effectively shunt her out of power politics for a decade. 75 would hardly be the right age for a woman of relatively poor health to restart a derailed political journey.

For the DMK, things are no better. A favourable verdict seems an unlikely event in the 2G case and the speculation today is only on the nature and quantum of punishment. To add to their woes, the squabble for control being fought by Karunanidhi’s younger son and heir apparent, M K Stalin and elder son and former Union minister, M K Azhagiri, has had a demoralising effect on the party’s rank and file. At 93+, Karunanidhi is certainly not in a fit condition to stem the rot, hold the party together and propel it to success in the hustings.

Interestingly, no political party in the state is in a position to take advantage of the cataclysms shaking the big two. Vaiko is so obsessed with Sri Lanka’s Tamils that he seems to have forgotten that this large ethnic group cannot vote for him in India. Actor-turned politician, Vijaykanth is yet to come out from under the folds of his wife Premalatha’s saree. With Bacchus as his constant companion, this reel-life hero has been relegated to the role of a real life comedian. The PMK with its frequent somersaults on alliances and issues, no longer holds the promise it once had for the backward communities. The BJP, which has been riding the Modi wave elsewhere in India, will be hard pressed to do a Jharkhand in Tamilnadu. Modi’s speechmaking capabilities will by and large be wasted in Tamilnadu, where almost half a century under the Dravidian parties has ensured the birth of two generations deficient in Hindi, the language in which Modi communicates. As for the Congress, riven by a multiplicity of factions, the lesser said the better...

Given these circumstances, 2015 promises to be O Paneerselvan’s year. Like Bharata (in the Ramayana), he has done an admirable job of warming the seat for his Amma. But if he does not come out of her shadow and assert himself as a chief minister on his own right, then the next election in Tamilnadu will deliver a verdict so fractured that it could send the state plummeting in all spheres of activity.

The reality will unfold in the days to come...