The tragic death of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar, whose body was found in a five star hotel in New Delhi on Friday evening, is a grim reminder of the negative fallout of social media.

This arm of the media has revolutionised the way ordinary people, who have no direct links or means to connect with traditional media can communicate, and even get their story told to a wide cross-section of people.

Facebook and Twitter have played a huge positive role in the way several autocratic or corrupt regimes have been made to bite the dust, as the Arab Spring has showed.

But free access to social networking sites was bound to have its downside and this has been evident in the way people can misuse this arm of the media to settle personal scores. So we have stalking, trolling, hacking of accounts and worse.

Beneficial to women On the one hand, the worldwide web has proved to be a great equaliser for women, especially in those parts of the world where they do not have access to equal opportunities in fields such as education. On a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) such as Alison, there are more women (about 65 per cent) than men.

Its founder, Mike Feerick, who has reached free online courses to over two million people, had told this columnist that in the developing world, several women do chores at home and can study online when their kids are asleep or gone to school.

It is self-paced learning: “You can start learning when and where you want. It really works for them. Also, we have a very high percentage of women from wealthy countries with internet access. They think: ‘Well, I might not be able to go to a university but I can go online and learn an awful lot’. I am really pleased about that, because women are a great resource of the world that is not being fully used... it’s about social justice and so much more.”

The flip side But the flip side is that women, being much more emotional, impulsive, hasty and, dare I say, ethical or honest compared to men can hurt their interests more through easy access to social media.

One will never know what made Sunanda Pushkar use Twitter to make allegations or expose her husband’s friendship with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar.

What should have remained within her home and a close circle of family and friends was unfortunately tossed out mercilessly to the whole world.

We’ll never be able to judge… actually find out, what led her to take this brutal step; brutal not only to the other two persons involved, but also herself.

Nobody will deny how traumatic it is for a woman, or a man, to go out and tell the whole world that her spouse is cheating on her. And we’re kidding ourselves if we think a good percentage of marriages do not face similar issues, notwithstanding vows of fidelity.

Extreme anger or impulse? PsychiatristThara Srinivasan, Director of Chennai-based SCARF (Schizophrenia Research Foundation), agrees that women tend to be more emotional and impulsive than men.

On Pushkar taking the extreme step of placing on Twitter her husband’s alleged BBM exchanges with Tarar, she says this could have been due to anger, impulse or an extreme step to force him to end the relationship. “It could have been a lot of anger, as also the feeling that by taking this action she can either get back at him, the other woman or force him to end it.” It could also have been a calculated move because Shashi Tharoor is a public figure with political ambitions.

“So she might have thought that a public exposure of such information would leave him no choice other than ending the relationship that she suspected.”

Add to this a sense of insecurity as it was the third marriage for her, as also him, says Srinivasan.

Also, adds Srinivasan, social networking sites make it extremely easy to take a decision on impulse. “You just need to type out a few lines and put them out there, without thinking of the consequences.”

The doctor said that even though she did not know Pushkar personally, from “what I have read of her, I don’t think this could have been a case of suicide. She was an extremely strong person, and I would think she would have taken an overdose of sleeping pills to get some rest”.

But whatever the reasons for Pushkar’s extreme behaviour — close friends have said the marriage had been turbulent for some time now — the tragic end of this story, and the way the television channels have gone on overdrive, giving it overtones of a third grade Indian film drama, raises several uncomfortable questions.

Media stands discredited The manner in which some of the Hindi film channels ran the story 24x7 — I was in Jaipur when the story broke and had access to many Hindi channels — left a lot to be desired. Headlines such as ‘ Pati, Patni or Woh ’ were respectable in comparison with the speculation that was let loose about the alleged “affair” between the pati and the woh .

A couple of Pakistani journalists were lined up to comment on the “character” of Tarar. One male anchor gleefully distanced himself from her saying she had come on his channel as a guest speaker only a couple of times, “but yes, she was connected to very high profile people”.

While his answers were welcomed and he was given substantial air time, the other woman journalist, who dared to say that the Indian media was full of speculative reporting with no consideration for the reputation of the woman, who was also a mother, on the other side of the border, was shouted down and dismissed in no time.

Granted Tharoor is a public person. Granted there were some serious differences between him and his late wife.

But even before her body was found, our TV channels were gloating about how she had sent their anchors text messages and wanted to relate her side of the story.

This might sound harsh, but the entire tragedy and the way it was exploited by a good section of the Indian media, particularly the electronic media, raised the stink of vultures feeding on dead flesh and even prior to the death, swooping down upon a potential “newsmaker”.

It’s time we turned our powerful camera lenses inward and did some introspection.

> rasheeda.bhagat@thehindu.co.in

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