Sunanda Pushkar, former director of sales of a Dubai-based real estate company hit the headlines first almost three years back when she was spotted with Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor at social gatherings. She was also in the thick of the controversy around IPl team Kochi Tuskers back in 2010. It was alleged that Tharoor put her as a front to collect Rs70 crore for helping the Kochi owners get their IPl team.
Couple had got married in August 2010 in his ancestral home in Elavanchery village in Kerala’s Palakkad district. It was both’s third marriage. Pushkar was first married to 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.
Pushkar belonged to a family of landlords and Army officers from Bomai, 8 km from Sopore in the Kashmir Valley.
Tharoor tied the knot with Tilottama Mukherji, an academic from Kolkata. later he married Christa, a Canadian working at the United Nations. After their divorce, Tharoor married Pushkar. Her father is lt Col (retd) PN Dass who retired from the Army in 1983. She had two brothers, one of whom works in a bank; the other is in the Army. She was a graduate of Government College for Women, Srinagar.
The 57-year-old Minister is an alumnus of St Stephen’s College from where graduated in Arts and went on to pursue graduate studies at The Fletcher School of law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, from where he obtained an MA in 1976, an MA lD in 1977 and a PhD in 1979 at age 23. Tharoor’s career in the United Nations began in 1978 as a staff member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. Just a couple of days ago 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.
