Know who was Sunanda Pushkar

New Delhi: In an indecorous controversy surrounding Shashi Tharoor, the Union Minister's wife Sunanda Tharoor on Wednesday alleged that her husband was having an extra-marital affair with a Pakistan-based journalist, only to issue a joint statement later with her husband to say that all is well. Two days later she was found dead in a Delhi hotel room in mysterious circumstances. So who was Sunanda Pushkar? Prior to her marriage, Sunanda was a sales director in a Dubai-based real estate company Tecom. In April 2010, she had to relinquish a stake in the Kochi IPL team estimated at Rs 70 crore, when allegations of corruption against her then beau Tharoor (Union minister at the time) created a furor. This is not the first controversy that Pushkar has faced. In fact, it was just a couple of days ago that Pushkar got into an altercation with a journalist in Dubai. According to a report published in Khaleej Times, Pushkar was at a private dinner party with Tharoor when she accosted the journalist her husband was speaking to. Pushkar later denied the reports, and even tweeted about it. On 30 October, 2012, Pushkar slapped a man at the Thiruvananthapuram airport allegedly because the man misbehaved with her. According to news reports, the incident took place when the couple arrived at the airport on and were welcomed by a crowd of jubilant Congress workers. Television news channel footage showed an angry Sunanda slapping a man in the crowd who had apparently touched her inappropriately. She belongs to a family of landlords and Army officers from Bomai, 8 km from Sopore in the Kashmir Valley, India. Her father is Lt Col (retd) P N Dass who retired from the Army in 1983. She has two brothers, one of whom works for a bank; the other is in the Army. She is a graduate of Government College for Women, Srinagar. This is her third marriage with Shashi Tharoor. Her first husband was Sanjay Raina, a Kashmiri. After that marriage ended in a divorce, she married a Kerala businessman Sujith Menon who then died in a road accident in 1997. She has a 21-year-old son, Shiv Menon, from her second marriage.