Sunanda Pushkar's tumultous life with Union minister Shashi Tharoor comes to a tragic end

Sunanda Tharoor, wife of Shashi Tharoor, was found dead in her room number 345 of Delhi’s posh Hotel Leela into which she and Tharoor  had checked in on Thursday morning, since their official house on Lodhi Road was being fumigated.

The door of the room was opened by the hotel staff in the presence of Tharoor and she was found lying dead. No suspicious material was found in the room. It is also probable that Sunanda died of natural causes since she was suffering from TB and had undergone a three-month treatment
at a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram.

It was Tharoor who informed his personal secretary that his wife was not picking up the phone.

Then the hotel staff was alerted. The police arrived at 8.30pm and declared her dead. Her body has since been taken to AIIMS for post-mortem. Only a post-mortem will confirm the exact cause of death, the police said.

A reporter who was at the super deluxe Leela Hotel in Chanakyapuri,  Delhi’s diplomatic quarter, to intereiw her was told at 6.30pm that Sunanda was sleeping. This reporter was the last person who tried to contact her.

“No suicide note has been found in the room after preliminary search. We also had a word with Mr Tharoor who came to the hotel as well,” said special commissioner (law and order) Deepak Mishra.

Shashi Tharoor’s PA Abhinav Kumar said: “Shashi Tharoor reached the hotel at 8.30pm. Sunanda had booked suite no 345. He opened the front door. The bedroom door was closed. When he opened it he found her lying on the bed. He informed the hotel management which called up the police.

The police said a case has been registered and preliminary investigations have begun. The SDM has been asked to investigate if there was any foul play.

Hotel authorities confirmed that room was booked in the name of Sunanda and she had moved in 48 hours ago. Special commissioner of police Deepak Mishra confirmed the incident. The room in which Pushkar was staying has been sealed by the police.

Tharoor was supposed to be at NDTV for a panel discussion in the evening. His office rang up NDTV to say that some family urgency had cropped up and that he would not be at the discussion.

Sunanda’s close friends, with whom she had spoken to over the past two days, said she was highly depressed. “She was crying and wailing on the phone when she talked to me. She had been suffering from Lupus and of late was also diagnosed with stomach TB. She was on medicine,” a close friend of Sunanda told dna.

The friend said Sunanda asked her if she knew of any cellphone expert who could retrieve some old BBM messages, and that she suspected Tharoor was hiding many things from her. The friend said Sunanda mentioned one message Tharoor had exchanged with Meher Tarar, the Pakistani journalist. “One message, she suspected, was that Tharoor was planning to leave her after the elections,” the friend said.

The news comes just a day after Sunanda and her husband Shashi Tharoor were involved in a Twitter controversy that also involved a Pakistani journalist Meher Tarar. As the row escalated, the controversy-prone minister took to Twitter to come out with a joint statement with Sunanda to say they were “happily married” but distressed by “some unauthorised tweets”.

“We wish to stress that we are happily married and intend to remain that way. Sunanda has been ill and hospitalised this week and is seeking rest. We would be grateful if the media respects our privacy,” said the statement by Tharoor, who married Pushkar in 2010.

The row erupted after exchange of some messages involving the three, some of them intimate.

“We are distressed by the unseemly controversy that has arisen about some unauthorised tweets from our twitter accounts,” the diplomat-turned-politician said. Pushkar had accused the 45-year-old Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar of stalking her husband and trying to “break” her marriage when she was away for medical treatment.

Both Tharoor and Pushkar had married twice before. The minister of state for human resources development is a Congress Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram.