Everybody who got linked to Sushant Singh Rajput’s death case
Sushant Singh Rajput was a 34-year-old promising Indian actor who was found dead on 14th June 2020, and for the next 3 months or more, the case has transfixed India.
As aptly summarized by the Guardian, the story that began in June, when the actor Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his Mumbai apartment, was initially one of grief and tragedy. Police ruled that he had killed himself.
Yet the spectacle it has morphed into since — involving misogyny, drugs, money, media witch-hunts, feuds, police leaks, federal investigations, state elections, and the arrest of a Bollywood star — has become an unprecedented national obsession, with everyone from senior politicians to Amnesty International wading in.
In this article, I have tried to map all the individuals whose name got pulled in into this case. The names involved individuals from different professions and they got pulled in for a wide variety of reasons. Further, I have tried to show the connections between the different names, so that we can identify the different clusters and linkages.
The recipe for the analysis is to scrape the news articles from a few of the leading Indian newspapers. From 6 of the big media houses like Times group, NDTY, ZEE network, DNA, and Hindustan Times, more than 5000 news articles were extracted. Of them, more than a hundred were directly covering news related to the death case. From all the news articles scraped, names of individuals were extracted and connections were mapped in the form of a network graph.
This is how the overall network graph looks like:
No doubt the visual is difficult to comprehend, but you may note that each of the edges in the visual represents a person. The reason for the chart is hazy is the sheer number of persons represented in this map, more than 200 to be precise, and that too from only about a hundred news articles. The lines among the edges represent the connections between the individuals.
Let us focus on a few interesting nodes from the diagram.
The most important node, of course, is of Sushant’s himself and it is connected to a few of the end nodes like other actors who are ‘outsiders’ to industry, other established actors who expressed their condolences, journalists who covered the death case, etc.
Next, it is not difficult to identify the next most important node, which is about Sushant’s live-in partner Rhea, which is connected to a whole lot of other nodes and edges. Rhea, who is also an actor, is connected to her parents, lawers, her demand for CBI inquiry to the home minister, Mahesh Bhatt who is allegedly her godfather in Bollywood, and a few other names in Bollywood. Shushant and Rhea are connected to Sushant’s ex-girlfriend Ankita who brought in a few other names in Sushant’s family like her sisters and relatives in the abatement-to-suicide angle.
If we look north, we see a cluster focussing on the political angle driving the investigation involving the Mumbai police, Bihar police, Enforcement Directorate and CBI. The names involve members of the ruling Shiv Sena party, the Chief Minister, the son of CM, the ex-CM, and goes all the way to the Prime Minister.
On the south-west end, connected to both Sushant and Rhea, we see the cluster of names coming up in the news related to the NCB and narcotics, ranging from people arrested for possession of hard or soft drugs, peddlers, suspects, the individuals who were summoned by the BCB, and other people vocal to explore the drug angle.
On the north-east, we find the individuals associated with Sushant’s last movie which released post his death and got unprecedented coverage, publicity, and attention. This also features his lead co-star in the movie and the alleged rumor of him harassing her which she later denied.
On the far-east, we have the names associated with the big Bollywood nepotism and cartelization debate, where we have individuals who have placed acquisition of the Bollywood malpractices as well as the ones who have shown their support and have testified against the existence of such unjust practices, and those actors who belong to the Bollywood families whose movies faced a lot of flak and outages as they were part of them.
There are a few names associated with the ‘murder’ angle of death. They have been vocal about the loopholes of the suicide theory and have placed competing theories of murder as the cause of death.
The analysis used the extremely powerful python package ‘newspaper’ which makes scraping news articles from any news source super easy — if has readily available functions to pick the date, headline, author, and other metadata information, and even a summary of the news. The other critical piece was to create a network graph for named entities and Ednalyn’s blog on this subject leveraging spacy and networkx libraries has been very helpful.
Suvadip Chakraborty is a data driven story-teller with 12 years of experience in data science and analytics. You may find the data preparation script in our github repo. Contact us at suvadipchakraborty@gmail.com for any queries. The opinions expressed in this column are that of the author.
