Indian minister and wife in Twitter tangle

An Indian federal minister and his wife have publicly professed that they are happily married, after a series of curious tweets from the minister’s account triggered speculations about marital discord.

On Thursday, Minister for Human Resources Department Shashi Tharoor and his wife Sunanda Pushkar, issued a statement saying they were happily married and intended to stay that way.

The statement followed several tweets linking the minsiter with a Pakistan-based journalist. Media reports suggested that Pushkar had been sending the tweets using her husband’s account. The minister said his Twitter account had been hacked.

The tweets accused the journalist of having a relationship and stalking the minister.

Later, in an interview to the NDTV channel,  Pushkar conceded that the word “stalking “ was probably a bit strong. 

“I was just trying to tell my husband to stay away from her because it’s election year. I was also a bit annoyed by a girl lying about me, trying to get close to my husband,” Pushkar said, adding that her husband was a minister. “I am a common person, “aam aadmi”. I get upset. I am a human being,” she told the news channel.

The exchanges turned into a hot topic across the social media on Wednesday forcing Tharoor to claim that his Twitter account was hacked, until it transpired that it was his wife who was tweeting using his account.  Eventually, the twitter accounts of both were deactivated. 

In the tweets, Pushkar also accused the journalist of being a Pakistani intelligence agent.

Reacting to the barrage of tweets, the journalist responded on Twitter saying Pushkar was “out of her mind”.

“I have nothing to say to a woman clearly out of her mind. To be called an ISI agent, a stalker. I have nothing to add. Just shows who she is,”  reports quoted her as saying.

Tharoor and his wife were a few years earlier involved in a controversy related to the popular Indian Premier League 20:20 cricket tournament, that forced the minister to resign as federal foreign minister in 2010.