Wife Of Indian Minister, Shashi Tharoor, 'Found Dead' After Reports Broke He Was Having An Affair

The wife of Indian minister Shashi Tharoor has been found dead, following reports that he was having an affair. Sunanda Pushkar is reported to have been discovered at a hotel in Delhi. The couple became embroiled in controversy over a series of Twitter messages on Thursday which appeared to reveal he was having an affair with a Pakistani journalist. The couple insisted they were happily married, blaming "unauthorised tweets".

Mr Tharoor married Ms Pushkar, a former Dubai-based businesswoman, in 2010. Read the full story below:

Pushkar first threatened to divorce her husband for “having an affair” with Tarar, whom she has labelled an “ISI agent.” Then, she accused the journalist of being a stalker who was trying to woo her husband. By late afternoon, she had done an about-turn, declaring that she and her husband were “happily married”. But the vitriol against 45-year-old Tarar, who lives in Lahore with a teenage son, continued on Twitter and on television. By evening, Pushkar had called the freelance journalist an intrepid “hacker” who managed to tweet from the accounts of both Pushkar and Tharoor and described the matter as a “national emergency”, serious enough to be taken up by both the Pakistan and the Indian high commissions.

The drama unfolded yesterday when Tharoor’s followers on Twitter, who number over two million, found that a personal tweet the minister had received from Tarar had been made public on his Twitter handle. It read: “@mehrtarar I love you, Shashi Tharoor. And I go while in love with you, irrevocably, irreversibly, hamesha. Bleeding, but always your Mehr.”

More such tweets followed — these have since been deleted from his account but remain as screen grabs on the social networking site.

Pushkar later admitted she had logged into her husband’s Twitter account and leaked the tweets. She also told a newspaper that Tharoor was having an affair with Tarar since April last year.It isn’t unusual for couples to share email and social networking passwords, but it doesn’t often lead to a public scandal.

However, hours after Pushkar raised the storm on Twitter, she and Tharoor issued a joint statement on the minister’s Facebook page saying that they were “happily married”.

“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. 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,” it said.