Shashi Tharoor moves HC to direct police to preserve Sunanda Pushkar’s Twitter account, tweets

PTI, Jun 4, 2020, 7:04 PM IST

New Delhi: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor 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.

Tharoor has claimed that the tweets clearly indicate that Pushkar was not having any “suicidal ideation” as is sought to be alleged by the prosecution.

The police had earlier told the court that Pushkar was suffering from mental agony due to a strained relationship with her husband.

She had a scuffle with her husband and had various injury marks a few days before her death, it had said.

Police has accused Tharoor of torturing his wife which led her to commit suicide.

The maximum punishment for the offence listed in the charge sheet is 10 years of imprisonment. However, if convicted for 302 (murder), the maximum punishment is death penalty while the minimum is life imprisonment.

Pushkar, 51, was found dead in a suite of luxury hotel Leela Palace in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri on the night of January 17, 2014.

The couple was staying at the hotel as the official bungalow of Tharoor was being renovated at that time.