New Delhi: More than a year after a court in the national capital had discharged Congress MP Shashi Tharoor of the charges of abetment to suicide and cruelty in the case related to the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar, the Delhi Police has challenged the decision in the Delhi High Court.
Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma issued a notice on Delhi Police’s application seeking “condonation of delay” in approaching the court. The matter will come up for hearing again on 7 February next year.
An application for condonation or overlooking delay is filed if a petition or appeal challenging a court order is filed beyond a permitted time limit. The application demands that the plea should be heard despite being filed late and the delay forgiven.
Pushkar, who was a Dubai-based businesswoman before getting married to Tharoor in 2010, was found dead in a luxury hotel in Delhi on 17 January 2014.
While the police had initially registered a murder case in 2015, the Delhi Police charged Tharoor with 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 in May 2018.
The MP from Thiruvananthapuram was, however, discharged in the case last year in August by Special Judge Geetanjali Goel.
During the hearing Thursday, senior advocate Vikas Pahwa pointed out that the petition has been filed after almost 15 months of the discharge. He also told the court that a copy of the plea has not been served on him.
Pahwa then referred to orders issued in the case, saying that documents related to it should not be shared with anyone other than parties involved in the matter, to protect Tharoor from a “media trial”.
While the high court questioned how this could be done given these are public documents, it took note of Delhi Police’s submission that the police didn’t want to object to the contention that the copy of the petition and documents shall not be supplied to any person who is not a party to the case.
‘No specific allegation, insufficient material’
In the discharge order from 2021, judge Goel had found that there was nothing to demonstrate prima facie that Tharoor had subjected Pushkar to cruelty.
The order had said: “In the present case, it cannot be said that the accused had ever intended or acted in such a manner which under normal circumstances would drive the deceased to commit suicide.”
“No doubt a precious life was lost. But in the absence of specific allegations and sufficient material to make out the ingredients of the various offences, and on the basis of which the court could, at this stage presume that the accused had committed the offence, the accused cannot be compelled to face the rigmaroles of a criminal trial,” the judge had said.
After his discharge, Tharoor had issued a statement saying his ‘faith in the Indian judiciary’ stood vindicated and ‘justice had been done, at last’.
He said: “I have weathered dozens of unfounded accusations and media vilification patiently, sustained by my faith in the Indian judiciary, which today stands vindicated. In our justice system, the process is all too often the punishment. Nonetheless, the fact that justice has been done, at last, will allow all of us in the family to mourn Sunanda in peace.”
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