SC disposes of Subramanian Swamy’s Sunanda Pushkar probe plea

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday disposed of the special leave petition filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy seeking a SIT probe into the “mysterious death” of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress MP Sashi Tharoor on January 17, 2014, at a hotel in the capital.

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Uday Lalit told Dr Swamy, “This case is over. The chargesheet has already been filed. We will dispose it off.”

Dr Swami moved the apex court after the Delhi high court had in October last year rejected the plea for a probe by a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT), observing that being a politician he has no locus standi to file such a petition. He claimed that it took nearly one year for the Delhi police to lodge an FIR in the case and the post-mortem report said that Sunanda had died of unnatural death. The bench, however, asked him to argue on the issue of maintainability.

The Delhi high court had on October 26, 2017, rejected Mr Swami’s plea for a court-monitored SIT probe into Sunanda’s death and termed his PIL as a “textbook example of a political interest litigation”. Mr Swami, in his plea before the high court, had alleged that the police had “botched up” the probe.