As the indecorous row surrounding the suave 57-year-old Tharoor escalated, the controversy-prone minister took to Twitter to come out with a joint statement with his wife Sunanda Pushkar to say they were "happily married", but distressed by "some unauthorised tweets".
"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 rest. We would be grateful if the media respects our privacy," said the statement by Tharoor, who married Pushkar in 2010. The row erupted after exchange of some messages involving the three, some of them intimate.
Pushkar has accused the 45-year-journalist Mehr Tarar of stalking her husband and trying to "break" her marriage when she was away for medical treatment.
Both Tharoor, who finds himself in the controversy barely months before the Lok Sabha elections, and Pushkar had married twice before. The Minister of State for Human Resources Development is a Congress Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram.
The tweet war, which set the social media abuzz, also saw Pushkar allege that Tarar was an ISI agent. Tarar denied the charge and threatened to file a defamation suit against her.
Pushkar also alleged that Tarar wanted to have a "relationship" with her husband and asked her to stay away.
Tarar, a mother of a 13-year-old son and an Op-ed writer and a contributor to a Pakistani daily, tweeted up a storm since the saga started playing out on social media, shooting off uncharitable barbs at Pushkar and defending herself.
"For a woman to trash another woman linking her w/her husband is the lowest form of sickness ever. It's nauseous. No respect for her marriage," the journalist said in a series of tweets.
After Tharoor's joint statement was issued, Tarar tweeted, "The wife trashed the husband. Now doing WTH damage control....".
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