The indignity that late Sunanda Pushkar has been made to go through after her tragic and highly suspicious death more than five months back is both appalling and extremely telling of the kind of across-the-spectrum corruption that had defined the former UPA regime. Not only there have been the ritual blame-games and passing the buck as far as holding people responsible for her untimely death as well as ascertaining the cause of her demise are concerned, there have been concerted attempts to bury the slew of facts under a heavy carpet of obfuscation. The maelstrom of accusations and counteraccusations surrounding her death has now taken another form in which even the faculty that is investigating the forensic reports and examining the ‘contradictory’ conclusions from the postmortem procedure has come under scanner. It is extremely unfortunate that the lady has been subjected to such ignominy after her sudden death and even a regime change at the centre couldn’t ensure that justice be done in a timely and clean manner.
However, Pushkar’s death is really the eye of a muck storm involving too many loose ends of major corruption scams and controversies that haven’t been thoroughly investigated so far, precisely because the former UPA government was neck-deep in all that fraudulence itself. Hence, the allegations by AIIMS’ Sudhir Gupta, who is in charge of the current investigations in Pushkar death case, that he had to suffer constant interference and pressure tactics from prominent ministers in the former union cabinet, including the health minister, do not come as a surprise. Whether they be unsubstantiated reports on Pushkar’s threat to expose the IPL Kochi franchise issue, or her proximity to many of the state secrets that Tharoor had been privy to, it is obvious that we need to know whether the feisty and vivacious lady had died a ‘natural’ or an ‘unnatural’ death, and whether that had anything to do with one or more of the former dispensation’s many swindles.
However, Pushkar’s death is really the eye of a muck storm involving too many loose ends of major corruption scams and controversies that haven’t been thoroughly investigated so far, precisely because the former UPA government was neck-deep in all that fraudulence itself. Hence, the allegations by AIIMS’ Sudhir Gupta, who is in charge of the current investigations in Pushkar death case, that he had to suffer constant interference and pressure tactics from prominent ministers in the former union cabinet, including the health minister, do not come as a surprise. Whether they be unsubstantiated reports on Pushkar’s threat to expose the IPL Kochi franchise issue, or her proximity to many of the state secrets that Tharoor had been privy to, it is obvious that we need to know whether the feisty and vivacious lady had died a ‘natural’ or an ‘unnatural’ death, and whether that had anything to do with one or more of the former dispensation’s many swindles.