April 18, 2010
NEW DELHI — A former high-level United Nations diplomat who had become a prominent and flamboyant figure in the Indian government resigned Sunday amid accusations that he had wrongly used his official influence to help a female friend get an ownership stake in a new franchise in India’s lucrative professional cricket league.
Times Topic: Shashi TharoorThe official, Shashi Tharoor, 54, submitted his resignation as a junior minister of foreign affairs after leaders of the governing Indian National Congress Party concluded in an emergency meeting on Sunday evening that his position was untenable. Opposition leaders had spent the past week hammering him with accusations that he had exploited his post for personal gain.
“It is a victory of truth,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, a spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, after Mr. Tharoor resigned. “It is a victory of the democratic process.”
Mr. Tharoor, a prolific author who made a failed campaign to become United Nations secretary general in 2006, was considered a favorite of the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi, and had become one of the more visible figures in the government, partly by building a large following on Twitter.
The allegations involve Mr. Tharoor’s role in helping organize a consortium from his home state of Kerala that made a successful $333 million bid for a new franchise in the Indian Premier League. The league’s commissioner, Lalit Modi, disclosed that one person in the investment group was Sunanda Pushkar, a woman described as a friend of Mr. Tharoor’s and who had been given an equity stake reportedly worth more than $15 million.
Indian news media have reported that Mr. Tharoor, who is married, has been romantically involved with Ms. Pushkar, though it has not been publicly confirmed. Mr. Tharoor could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
In recent days, he has insisted that he is innocent of any financial wrongdoing and denied that he was involved in granting equity stakes to Ms. Pushkar. He accused the cricket commissioner, Mr. Modi, of trying to stir up controversy because he had favored another bidder for the new franchise.
Mr. Modi countered that he had made his disclosure because even some members of the Kerala consortium were not aware of some of the group’s minority shareholders. “If somebody is trying to hide somebody’s identity, my job is to expose it,” Mr. Modi said in an interview last week in Mumbai. Mr. Modi is also under scrutiny; tax officials raided his office last week.
Mr. Tharoor’s resignation ends a turbulent 11-month run in government. He was reprimanded by the Congress Party after the news media disclosed that he was living in a five-star hotel while awaiting renovations on his official residence. He countered that he was personally paying the bills, but the image of a minister living in luxury undercut a public austerity drive by the party.
He also annoyed some elders in the party with his comments on Twitter, even as he won a larger and larger following among young Indians. “A person who could have been the big middle-class hope now stands sullied,” Barkha Dutt, a television commentator, said during a broadcast on Sunday.
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