WE have nothing to say on whether or not Shashi Tharoor drove his wife, Sunanda Pushkar, to suicide. That is for the investigating agencies to establish, one way or another. But we do have reservations about treating Sunanda’s emails to Tharoor in the hours preceding her death as constituting a dying declaration.

Insofar as this is the first time such a measure is resorted to in criminal investigation, it is imperative that the step in question is subjected to adequate scrutiny in light of available insights into the dynamics of the husband-wife relationship. In most comparable instances, mistrust has been the seed from which troubles sprouted.

So, a word about mistrust. Situations of simmering mistrust can develop as much from mere suspicion as from factual grounds. The issue here pertains to understanding one’s predicament within a disrupted relationship.

Even in the case of ordinary friendships, it happens that when their felicity is jarred, the individuals involved come under a psychological need to believe the worst about the other.

They tend also to exaggerate the hopelessness of their predicament. Mistrust inclines individuals towards exaggerating offences. So, they even become eager to believe the worst about each other. Mistrust is not, hence, a state hospitable to truth.

It is nearly impossible, besides, for a third party to read aright the tones and torments of an intimate relationship gone awry. What sting, what sweetness, what bitterness, what cutting edges does an event, a statement, a word, have when located in the shape-shifting zone of an intimate relationship? To understand its mind-boggling complexity, consider this: you don’t understand yourself adequately at any point in time.

You, who cannot understand yourself, have to understand your partner, who, like you, cannot understand herself either. Two twilight continents are in conjunction in a relationship. Even in the best of situations they cannot know the whole truth about their relationship. Psychologists tell us that anxiety lurks at the root of relationships, ready to sprout and spring up as weeds of mistrust and misery.

In any pursuit of justice for Sunanda, a distinction needs to be made between the best the state can do to establish the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on the one hand, and wanting to make out a plausible case against Shashi Tharoor.

The communication between a husband and wife makes proper sense only between them. They are not, unlike suicide notes and dying declarations, public statements. They are meant to be seen, strictly, by the designated individual. It is improper to use them for purposes extraneous to their private relationship.

That is why morphing them together, within the matrix of crime-investigation, into a dying declaration is unfair especially to Sunanda. Don’t forget, Sunanda loved Tharoor to distraction. The extent of the hurt she felt was a measure of the intensity of her love. When love turns into its opposite — mistrust-driven hate — it re-orients its genius from protecting to hurting. This, however, is a passing state, apt to be seen as final in light of suicide.

Finally, suicide denotes a sub-rational situation in which the individual concerned is too distraught to think and act in fidelity even to who she is. Deep in the psyche of every human being is the awareness that suicide is unforgivable.

A sense of guilt skirts the thought of suicide. In such a state, the person concerned experiences a crying need to convince herself that she is indeed at the dead-end and that there is nothing to look forward to. In a state of mind in which the ‘will to live is lost’, it is unlikely that the capacity for factual thinking is fully functional. The situation is apt to lend itself, though not necessarily, to emotional exaggeration.

The issue of particular concern is that of creating a precedent that breaches the barrier between the private and the public. Emails between a wife and husband are not, by any stretch of imagination, public documents, much less public declarations.

We greatly regret that she came to this sorry pass. We have no basis for assuming that Tharoor treated her with adequate sensitivity and responsibility at a time she was — as it seems in retrospect — staggering under the burden of having to live, burdened with an impaired will to live. It is farthest from our intention to underplay the crushing burden it would have meant for Sunanda.

But questions persist, nonetheless. To what extent did Tharoor drive her, actively or passively, over the edge? Was Sunanda prone to depressions? Where does the balance of judgement lie?

One last issue; for that too is important. The function of law — and its major limitation — is to identify and punish commissions of crime. It is not in the province of law to impose positive obligations on individuals. Law can punish you for hurting others.

But it cannot punish you for not loving others. Be that as it may, it is imperative to be mindful of the prospects for erring in the administration of justice, if a precedent is created of treating private correspondence — in this case, emails between a wife and husband written in a state of extreme exasperation — as dying declarations. They are not ‘declarations,’ but communications. The distinction is crucial and it could pervert the pursuit of justice to confuse these categories.

—The Statesman

Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2018