I’m Not Acting as Proxy for Tharoor: Sunanda Pushkar
Linked to the IPL Kochi team controversy, Sunanda Puskhar exploded at her critics on Wednesday, denying that she is acting as a proxy for her friend and minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, said media reports.
Issuing a hard-hitting statement, she blamed media for overlooking her professional background and international business experience and concentrating ‘obsessively on my personal life as if a woman cannot be capable of professional or financial success’, reports said.
“My own business interests and assets are substantial, and efforts to besmirch Tharoor by presenting me as a proxy for him are personally insulting for me as a woman and as a friend. I have built up a respectable and successful career while coping with widowhood and raising a child as a single mother. Yet I have been reduced to a caricature in the media, portrayed with inaccuracies and falsehoods,” she was quoted as saying.
Pushkar said that she was issuing the statement ‘to set the record straight about my role in the public controversy surrounding the Kerala IPL Team franchise’, said reports.
She claimed that Rendezvous approached her last year ‘inviting me to associate myself with them as a consultant in their various sporting activities and particularly in their potential bid to acquire the franchise of an IPL team’, reports said.
“I had previously been approached by Karim Morani of Kolkata Knight Riders to join them in a similar capacity and had regretted that the timing was not convenient for me,” she was quoted as saying.
She said that she had ‘lived a life of integrity and committed no crime, yet I am treated in a humiliating manner. My parents, friends and family members have been hounded by intrusive journalists. My personal life is nobody else’s business and if I have a marriage to announce, I will do it myself, rather than leave it to strangers. I would request the media to respect my privacy.”
(Based on internet reports)
