Who was Sunanda Pushkar?

Sunanda Pushkar was an entrepreneur and wife of Congress politician Shashi Tharoor. Pushkar was found dead in her hotel suite in New Delhi on January 17, 2014 at the age of 51. Tharoor, who was under investigation after her death, was on Wednesday cleared of all charges in the Sunanda Pushkar case by Delhi court.

Her death has been described
as one of the most controversial and mysterious events in recent years. 

Born in 1962 in a Kashmiri family to
Lt Colonel Pushkar Nath Dass and Jaya Dass, Pushkar, alongside her parents,
moved to Jammu in 1990 following the unrest in the valley.

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Pushkar graduated from the Government Women’s College in Srinagar in 1988, before moving to Dubai, and then Canada, to pursue her career choices.

She reportedly met Shashi Tharoor
at a party in 2008, and the two were married in 2010, at Tharoor’s ancestral
home in Kerala’s Elavanchery.

Before Tharoor, Pushkar was married twice — first fellow Hotel Management graduate Sanjay Raina, and then to Sujith Menon. She also has a son with Menon. 

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Pushkar’s meteoric professional rise has had its share of controversies. In 2009, reports suggested that Pushkar was given sweat equity worth Rs
700 million in Rendezvous Sports World (RAW), a company which, in the following
year, bid for newly-formed IPL side Kochi Tuskers Kerala.

She was made the Director of the
company on February 25, 2010, 18 days before the IPL bid. Allegations arose against
Tharoor that he had used his political influence in getting her the position
and making her a proxy for him. Tharoor resigned following the incident, while
Pushkar said the company had wanted her due to her relevant professional experience
in the field.

On January 16, 2014, Pushkar had a
Twitter spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, over the latter’s alleged relationship
with Tharoor. Reportedly, Pushkar had accused Tarar of being an ISI agent, with
the latter denying the allegations and terming them ‘absurd’. The tweets,
however, were deleted from Pushkar’s timeline later.

The following day she was found dead
in New Delhi’s Hotel Leela Palace, with a post-mortem report saying that it was
a case of a sudden, unnatural death.