A senior Indian politician and his wife have denied reports they are to divorce after she apparently hacked his Twitter account and posted messages implying he was having an affair with a Pakistani journalist.
Shashi Tharoor, India’s human resources minister – known as ‘Minister Twitter’ for his love of the social messaging site – was left acutely embarrassed after the messages appeared on his feed.
They suggested to his more than two million followers that he was in the throes of a passionate affair with Mehr Tarar, a high profile journalist.
Mr Tharoor, 57, deleted the tweets, claiming his account had been ‘hacked’. But his wife, Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor, subsequently told two Indian newspapers that she had published the private messages between him and Ms Tarar.
One message, which appeared to have been directly sent from Ms Tarar’s account, said: ‘I love you, Shashi Tharoor. And I go while in love with you, irrevocably, irreversibly, hamesha [always]. Bleeding, but always your Mehr.’
Ms Tarar denied sending the messages and any suggestion that she was in a relationship with Mr Tharoor. She tweeted that she had ‘always praised Shashi Tharoor OPENLY on twitter. Wrote an op-ed on him. Reviewed his book. Forwarded tweets. Only b/c [because] NOTHING to hide’.
But Mrs Tharoor told India’s Economic Times newspaper that she had published the tweets to show the world how Ms Tarar was ‘stalking’ her husband.
She said: ‘Our accounts have not been hacked and I have been sending out these tweets. I cannot tolerate this. This is a Pakistani woman who is an ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) agent, and she is stalking my husband.
‘And you know how men are. He is flattered by the attention.’
Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar is at the centre of the controversy
She was also quoted by The Indian Express as saying that she would seek a divorce after learning that her husband and Ms Tarar had been having a ‘rip-roaring affair’ since April, which had left her feeling ‘destroyed as a wife and a woman’.
‘I completely stand by my tweets, I 100 per cent stand by that,’ she told the paper.
‘That woman pursued and pursued him .. men are stupid anyways … for all you know she is a Pakistani agent. Where’s love, where’s loyalty in this world … I am so distraught.’
Mrs Tharoor’s claims were strenuously denied by Ms Tarar, who is a columnist for Lahore’s Daily Times newspaper.
In a statement given to India’s NDTV channel, she said: ‘In her tweets, she has accused me both of stalking him and of having an affair with him. How can it be both?
‘It just shows there are wild allegations. Her tweets to me are so crazy that all I can do is laugh.
‘Maybe she took offense to the fact that I have praised him so much. But I am very transparent – anything that I have said is on my Twitter timeline, for the whole world to see.’
Ms Tarar interviewed Mr Tharoor in New Delhi last April, after which she wrote a flattering profile in which she described him as ‘strikingly good looking’ with a ‘powerful, deep and sensuous’ voice.
But as controversy grew over the alleged affair today, things took an even more bizarre turn as the Tharoors released a joint statement on Facebook denying that they are planning to split.
‘We are distressed by the unseemly controversy that has arisen about some unauthorised tweets from our Twitter accounts,’ the statement said.
‘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 unauthorised tweets — comments that were not intended for publication — have been misrepresented and led to some erroneous conclusions.
‘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.’
Mr Tharoor is a former UN diplomat who was once touted as a future secretary general.
