NEW DELHI: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Thursday approached the Delhi High Court seeking direction to the police to take steps to preserve the Twitter account and tweets made by his wife Sunanda Pushkar prior to her death in 2014. The application, which is likely to come up for hearing on June 8, said the tweets and Twitter timeline of Pushkar is of utmost importance in the case and as she is not alive, there is an apprehension that the account and the tweets may be deleted.
They are a crucial right of Tharoor to exonerate himself from the alleged false charges levelled against him, it said. Tharoor, the sole accused in the death case of his wife, sought direction to the police to ask ‘Twitter India’ to preserve Pushkar’s account till the pendency of the proceedings before the trial court. The former Union minister was accused by Delhi Police under Sections 498-A (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code.
The plea referred to Twitter’s policies as per which it can delete the accounts of users who have been inactive for a long period of time. ‘Further, in certain cases, if some authorised person or close relative of a deceased person contacts Twitter, the account of such deceased person can be deactivated. In such cases of deletion of account or deactivation of account, the tweets and contents of the Twitter timeline are lost forever,’ it said. The application was filed in a pending petition seeking direction to the police to place before the trial court certain tweets of Pushkar. With agency inputs