New Delhi:A Delhi court on Tuesday took cognisance of the chargesheet against Congress leader Shashi Tharoor in the case relating to the death of his wife, Sunanda Pushkar, in 2014 under mysterious circumstances.
Tharoor has been summoned by the court to appear on 7 July, when it will next hear the matter.
The court said that there were sufficient grounds to proceed against Tharoor, who has been named as an accused for abetment to suicide and cruelty in the chargesheet by the Delhi police.
The Delhi police filed a chargesheet running into nearly 3,000 pages in the Patiala House Court, on 14 May, four years after Sunanda Pushkar was found dead in her room at Delhi’s Leela Palace.
The chargesheet named Tharoor as an accused in the case and charged him under section 306 (abetment to suicide) and section 498A (cruelty in marriage) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860. It also urged the court to summon Tharoor as an accused.
The maximum punishment under section 498A is three years of imprisonment, while under section 306 it is a jail term of 10 years.
An appeal by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy against the dismissal of a probe to investigate the alleged murder of Sunanda Pushkar is pending in the Supreme Court.
On 26 October, Delhi high court had dismissed Swamy’s plea on grounds that it was perhaps a textbook example of political interest litigation being dressed up as a public interest litigation.
Swamy had moved Delhi high court in July last year seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)-monitored SIT (Special Investigation Team) investigation into the alleged murder of Sunanda Pushkar.
The petition had alleged that Tharoor, along with fellow Congress leader and former Union health minister and leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, tried to “mislead” the investigators, and pressurise the head of the forensic department at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to give a favourable autopsy report.