The strange case of Sunanda Pushkar

For almost a year now there has been a peculiar lethargy with which the Sunanda Pushkar death has been handled. There have been constant questions about why the process has been so shambolic, and at many times there seems to be an deliberate effort being made to buy into all the easy arguments, and wreck the evidence.

I cannot say I was a friend of Sunanda Pushkar as I did not know her well enough. We had met socially a few times, in India and abroad, and had always said in that strangely meaningless manner of greeting "we must meet soon". Somehow, even though I had thought we would get around to it one day, we never followed it up.

Then... Around two years ago, we suddenly began hearing rumours that the Tharoor marriage was on the rocks. One never pays attention to Delhi gossip because so much of it is just malicious rubbish. I also did not know whether I could believe it because the public demeanour of the Tharoors together was so different to what people were saying with great confidence privately. It was disturbing. And, yes, when I last met her at a party a few months before her death, she did not look at all like the woman I had met when she had just got married. This Sunanda no longer glowed and giggled but seemed rather distraught. She even disappeared, in the middle of the get together, to sit alone in another room, obviously messaging someone on her phone. She did not seem happy, anymore.

Whatever the reason, her later very public emotional breakdown was something few of us would ever forget. The embarrassing tweets and revelations, her falling out with her husband, and her spat with the (presumed) other woman was made for reality television, and it played out exactly in that manner. None among us was sensitive enough to imagine that perhaps the woman might have been in the middle of an abusive relationship, or she might have been emotionally disturbed or that she might have been in some physical danger.

Regardless of what actually happened, I have often felt that her death was a perfect murder. Almost based on the Patrick Hamilton play, Gaslight, in which the husband convinces the wife that she is unwell, perhaps even psychologically fragile. And then proceeds to make her even more nervous through his erratic behaviour. Similarly, what if someone had convinced Sunanda she was unwell, and then proceeded to convince her she did not have long to live?

Despite that, she seemed to fight back and had even planned to avenge herself by revealing everything she knew. That's where the play and the reality differ. In Gaslight, the wife manages to find a confidante.

But the biggest mistake Sunanda might have made was to trust those around her, as they wanted to survive and were obviously quite willing to betray her.

Yet Sunanda might still have her revenge. Because the biggest mistake the murderer made was not to realise that people might ask the one fundamental question: if Sunanda genuinely thought she had very little time to live, why would she have killed herself?

It was the first question the police should have asked, as well as those who tried to convince us it was suicide.