Scandal in India takes down well-known cabinet minister

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One of India's best known cabinet ministers has lost his job in a scandal that involves sex, sports and the country's self-image as a modernizing global player.

Shashi Tharoor served less than a year as Minister of State for External Affairs before his party forced him to quit on Sunday night over allegations that he helped a female friend get a financial stake in a professional cricket team.

His downfall was lamented among his 700,000 followers on Twitter and the country's growing class of educated, English-speaking professionals - sometimes called the "new India" - for whom Mr. Tharoor promised a new brand of politics.

Among the flurry of messages on the social-networking site was one describing Mr. Tharoor as the "right person in a wrong political system," and another calling him "a misfit in ancient politics."

The theme of new versus old was deliberately stoked by Mr. Tharoor as he clung to his job in recent days, blasted by the opposition over questions about whether a woman described as his Canadian girlfriend received the equivalent of $16-million (Canadian) as payment for the politician's backroom help for a sports franchise. "You folks are the new India," Mr. Tharoor wrote to his Twitter supporters. "We will 'be the change' we wish to see in our country. But not without pain!"

Observers say the politician did represent something new for India when he launched his political career with much fanfare last year. An accomplished author and former United Nations diplomat, he was once nominated for the post of UN Secretary-General.

After Mr. Tharoor failed to get the top UN job, India's Congress Party parachuted him into the state of Kerala as a star candidate in a general election. He performed well, sweeping to victory by 100,000 votes in a region where contests are usually won by narrower margins.

But he remained an outsider in Kerala, analysts say, and he did not cultivate the usual patron-client relationships that might have given him the local support to endure a scandal. Rather than currying favour like an Indian politician, he behaved with the aloofness of a technocrat.

"He emerged at the wrong time," said Gopa Kumar, head of the political science faculty at the University of Kerala. "India's economy has changed, but its politics have not changed."

Still, others saw the media frenzy that preceded Mr. Tharoor's resignation as a sign that India's political culture is becoming less conservative. The story first gained momentum after a Twitter posting by Lalit Modi, head of the Indian Premier League, revealed the cabinet minister's involvement in the lucrative cricket business. The accusations and counter-accusations between Mr. Tharoor and Mr. Modi - himself a household name in India - were fuelled by 24-hour news channels that have grown rapidly in recent years.

Speculation focused on Mr. Tharoor's relationship with Sunanda Pushkar, reportedly a Canadian who now lives in Dubai, who has attended social functions with the minister even as he finalizes his separation from his second wife, Christa Giles, who is also Canadian.

The chief of the cricket league also endured questions about his romantic life, as it emerged that he had asked Mr. Tharoor to deny a visa for Gabriella Demetriades, a 23-year-old South African model.

Photographs of the women connected to the story flashed on-screen repeatedly during television coverage of the scandal.

"It was unusually salacious," said Shankar Raghuraman, an associate editor at the Times of India. "Before now, the attitude of the media tended to be that private life is private. Some senior politicians have mistresses and everybody knows. But that is beginning to change, with the dominance of the news channels."

In that sense, the veteran journalist said, the rising political star of "new India" was not destroyed by the old system; instead, he was devoured by the same new information culture that he championed.

"That is the great irony," Mr. Raghuraman said.