SC questions maintainability of Swamy's plea in Sunanda case

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday asked BJP leader Subramanian Swamy to satisfy it on the aspect of maintainability of his plea seeking a SIT probe into the death of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar in 2014.

Sunanda was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. Swamy has moved the apex court after the Delhi High Court had in October last year dismissed his plea seeking a probe by a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) into Pushkar’s death.

During the hearing on Monday, a bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy told Swamy that he has to first satisfy the court on whether his plea was maintainable. “Before going into merits, we need to be satisfied on maintainability,” the bench told Swamy who said that it is a matter of public interest.

He claimed that it took nearly one year for the Delhi Police to lodge FIR in the case and the post-mortem report said that Sunanda had died an unnatural death. The bench, however, asked him to argue on the issue of maintainability and posted the matter for hearing after three weeks.

The Delhi High Court had on October 26, last year, rejected Swamy’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”. Swamy, in his plea before the high court, had claimed that the police had “botched up” the probe and accused Tharoor of “interfering” in the investigation now and even earlier when he was a minister in the UPA regime.

When the high court questioned the source based on which he had made the allegations, the BJP leader and his lawyer, who is a co-petitioner, had said that they would file affidavits to reply to the court’s query. However, the bench had rejected their offer, saying it appeared that they had concealed information pertinent to the case, which they ought to have disclosed when they had filed the petition.

The high court had also said that Swamy ought to have mentioned his political affiliation as well as that of Tharoor in his petition as these facts were important to the adjudication of the case.