New Delhi: Federal minister Shashi Tharoor on Thursday said that he is happily married and intend to remain that way.
The junior minister for human resource development has been in the eye of a Twitter controversy involving a Pakistan-based journalist Mehr Tarar, which was strongly objected to by his wife Sunanda Tharoor, forcing the minister to say that his Twitter account had been hacked.
“We are distressed by the unseemly controversy that has arisen about some unauthorised tweets from our Twitter accounts. Various distorted accounts of comments allegedly made by Sunanda have appeared in the press. It appears that some personal and private comments responding to these authorised tweets — comments that were not intended for publication — have been misrepresented and led to some erroneous conclusions,” the minister said in a joint statement issued with his wife Sunanda.
“We wish to stress that we are happily married and intend to remain that way. Sunanda has been ill and hospitalised this week and is seeking to rest. We would be grateful if the media respects our privacy,” the statement added.
The alleged hacking of Tharoor’s Twitter account on Wednesday has escalated into a full-fledged war of words between Sunanda and Mehr. Tharoor and Sunanda got married in 2010 and this happens to be third marriage for both of them.
Sunanda reacted sharply to some of the alleged tweeter exchanged between Tharoor and Mehr by calling her an ISI agent and accusing her of trying to create trouble in her marriage.
“For her (Mehr’s) information Shashi and I are very happy together, sad for her to know I guess. I get sick and go away for treatment and the vultures pounce,” Sunanda tweeted to Mehr.
In another tweet, she said, “The audacity of a woman desperately in love with an Indian ‘please shashi don’t make me go I pleaded and begged I love you Shashi’(sic).”
In yet another tweet, Sunanda said, “Leave us Indians alone and stop talking to my husband (husband) and pleading with him its degrading respect yourself as a woman (sic).”
Mehr added fuel to the fire by calling Sunanda a brainless blonde with poor knowledge of grammar and spelling. “Ask Mrs Tharoor how she can call me an ISI agent when I was tweeting. What have I done in India or Pakistan that I can be called an ISI agent,” Mehr said, adding that “this woman (Sunanda) constantly says something on social media and then is allowed to get away. Why will I hack into her account and tweet against myself,” Mehr questioned.
The tweets on Tharoor’s timeline that he supposed to have received were from Mehr which read: “@mehrtarar I love you, Shashi Tharoor. And I go while in love with you, irrevocably, irreversibly, hamesha (always). Bleeding, but always your Mehr.”
Another alleged tweet from Mehr read: “Shashi, I’m not crying any more. I’m not falling to pieces. I’m more lucid than ever. How little I knew you became visible to me.@mehrtarar”
Tharoor, 57, is a lawmaker from Kerala and is a former under secretary general of the United Nations. He was among the first Indian politician to take to twitter to connect with the masses and had landed himself in trouble within the Congress party by terming government’s austerity measures as “cattle class” in 2009.
He had to quit as the junior foreign minister next year after allegations that his then fiancee Sunanda Pushkar was offered sweepstakes in the now defunct Indian Premier League team Kochi. Tharoor returned as a minister only in October 2012 allegedly due to his proximity with the Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi who is number two in the party hierarchy.
However, based on Sunanda’s tweets, it is widely being said on social media that Tharoor’s Twitter account may not have been hacked at all and this exchanged with Mehr could be genuine in nature.
The controversy has come when the All India Congress Committee is slated to meet on Friday in the capital to discuss strategy for the April-May general elections.
