NEW DELHI: Delhi Police on Thursday approached the High Court challenging the last year’s trial court order discharging Congress leader Shashi Tharoor of all charges in the 2014 death case of his wife Sunanda Pushkar. The matter will be further heard on February 7, 2023.
A single-bench judge of Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma issued notice on the police application seeking ‘condonation of delay’ in approaching the court. ‘First, we will decide the condonation of delay application,’ the judge said.
On August 18, 2021, the Patiala House court in the city discharged the case pending for over seven years. During the hearing, Tharoor’s counsel Vikas Pahwa objected to the review plea, arguing that even though the trial court’s order was passed in August 2021, there is a 15-month delay in filing it. He said a copy of the plea was not served to his client.
As Pahwa submitted various orders passed by the session judge and other trial court judges during the trial, he said no documents of the case should be shared with anyone other than the parties. Pahwa and lawyer Gaurav Gupta, representing Tharoor, claimed the plea was not served on him and was “deliberately” sent to wrong email ID.
However, in reply, the HC pointed out that those are public documents. The court, considering Pahwa’s arguments, said a copy of the case files will be provided to the parties involved. Rupali Bandhopadhya, who appeared for the police, did not object.
On January 17, 2014, Pushkar was found dead in a suite at a luxury hotel in Delhi. A year later, the police initially registered an FIR against unknown persons on charges of murder. The police asked a Delhi court to prosecute Tharoor for abetment to suicide or “alternatively” frame murder charges against him on August 31, 2019.
The police later registered an FIR under IPC Section 302 (murder), charging Tharoor under Sections 306 (abetment to suicide) and 498A (cruelty by husband). The trial court had acquitted Tharoor as it observed that there was no prima facie willful conduct that could drive Pushkar to commit suicide.
Since there was no sufficient material, it was observed that the defendant isn’t required to go through the trouble of a criminal trial. Moreover, none of the reports submitted by Doctors and the Autopsy Board confirmed the cause of death as suicide, the special judge had observed.