Real life trumped satire as a Twitter row broke out between Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor, his wife Sunanda Pushkar-Tharoor and a Pakistani journalist, Mehr Tarar.
They began as a bizarre set of tweets from the Minister’s verified Twitter account. There were exhortations of love, quickly followed by betrayal in the mis-spelled, mis-punctuated manner that passes for communication on that medium. “Have your personal validation of my words, I don’t need any public one. For that I will wait until we are together publically really Mehr,” said one. Followed by, ““You unfollowed me. You don’t RT me and you don’t answer me on twitter. I can live with your favourites. I have your personal validation.” The general consensus on Twitter, as well as online magazines, seemed to be that the Minister’s account was hacked. Sure enough, a few hours later, Tharoor tweeted that his account was hacked and the social media company was setting it right.
Then began the twist in the tale. His wife Pushkar-Tharoor told journalists that those tweets were posted by her.
She accused Tarar of not only being an ISI agent but also stalking her husband. She wanted to show her up and had resorted to copying the BBM messages her husband had received and posting them on his Twitter feed.
As marital rows go, this was a rather voluble one. On Thursday morning, Pushkar attempted damage control. In a rambling, disconnected interview on a television channel, she conceded “stalker” might have been too strong a word to be used.
“But she wants to come to India at the drop of a hat. She wants to go around with him,” she said of Tarar. Both their Twitter accounts were hacked, she claimed further, before admitting that some tweets were indeed legitimately sent by her from her account.
In a sentence that should have been in a soap opera but unexpectedly turned up in a news channel, Pushkar-Tharoor said: “I was just trying to tell her to stay away from him. The one that came from his account was hacked. The three tweets I sent her today were that a woman should keep away from another woman’s husband.”
AICC meeting With the All India Congress Committee meeting scheduled for January 17 to decide on strategy for the impending union election, questions were raised about the damage these revelations would have on Tharoor’s career.
“I don’t care about (people saying I jeopardised his career). My career was jeopardised during IPL and I didn’t say anything. I hate cricket,” Pushkar-Tharoor explained.
Later in the day, the Tharoors released a “joint” statement about the matter. “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 unauthorised tweets – comments that were not intended for publication – have been misrepresented and led to some erroneous conclusions,” the statement said. ( Business Line sought clarification from Twitter about the hacking of the account, but the queries remained unanswered till press time.)
The couple stressed that they are happily married and intend to remain that way. The media was asked to respect their privacy. Pushkar-Tharoor continued to tweet clarifications about her happy marriage as well as her role in the IPL controversy of 2010 which first brought her into limelight.