Did we fail Sunanda Pushkar?

Sunanda Pushkar was not a trophy wife. She was not a Rs 50 crore girlfriend. She was an ambitious middle class woman who made it big, changing avatars along the way. The Srinagar hotel receptionist, the Malayali wife in the Gulf, the Dubai-based real estate agent, and finally Shashi Tharoor's glamorous wife, who was a little too much for Delhi society to swallow -- she laughed too often, glittered too much, and talked too loudly. Lutyens Delhi can forgive anything -- an electoral defeat, a stint in jail (now possibly seen as a routine professional hazard), a temporary reversal of fortune, even a betrayal of friends. But it cannot forgive a politician's wife with a personality.

Which explains why everyone in Delhi found it so difficult to credit Sunanda Pushkar as an independent woman. Her business credentials in Dubai were questioned, there was sniggering over her provincial roots and much eyebrow wiggling over her previous marriages -- no more, no less than Tharoor's. She was a self-made woman, a fairytale success, much like Shashi Tharoor, but we were less willing to listen to her story. We were waiting for her to fail, just as we had seen Rukhsana Sultana fail in the 1970s and Niira Radia fail in the 2000s. Successful women with no equally successful fathers/husbands lurking in the vicinity are always suspect in the eyes of Lutyens Delhi, especially if they seem to be enjoying themselves. As my sociologist guru Shiv Visvanathan says: Indians cannot enjoy the sight of other people enjoying themselves. Especially if that person does not fuflil the Mother Teresa ideal.

Indeed, it is tragic that Sunanda Pushkar, a woman who tried so hard to reinvent herself as a social butterfly (even the surname is a composite of her father's first name rather than the surname she was born with) to fit into Lutyens Delhi, was rejected by the same society in her death. It is sad that a woman so lively and alive is now remembered only for her post-mortem. In many ways, I read her story as a backlash of the elite. Here was a woman, who had seemingly come from nowhere, landed a prize catch so to speak, and was now revelling in the Page 3 attention, not behaving for a minute according to the coy bahu matrix expected of her. Lutyens wives could never quite accept her as a wife, having first been introduced to her as the IPL girlfriend. Wives are supposed to be to the manor born, not made in the public eye. Or as in the case of Princess Diana, remade and reinvented, from the shy bride to the globe-trotting philanthropist and finally to the leopard print clad siren on a rich playboy's yatch.

But more than her personal tragedy, Sunanda Pushkar also exposed the deep misogyny inherent in Delhi society. A successful woman, if she doesn't stick to the station in life assigned to her, is seen as flawed; a man in a similar position is seen as impervious to criticism. The prince is always charming, but whether his princess is Cinderella or wicked stepsister depends on what she does with a glass slipper. If she uses it metaphorically to beat her opponents (Sunanda lost no opportunity to attack her attackers, whether it was at an airport or in a TV studio), then she is seen as a troublemaker, an embarrassment, a liability, a heartbeat away from a teary eyed Panorama interview which reveals all.

Delhi was toxic for Sunanda, just as Buckingham Palace was poison for Princess Diana. Give this city as many male adventurers and fortune hunters as you like. But God help a female outsider who is seen as one. She won't even get an Elton John to sing at her funeral, just enraged TV anchors foraging for clues.