NEW DELHI: Indian Minister Shashi Tharoor was on Thursday at the centre of a cross-border “tweet war” between his wife and a Pakistani woman journalist, Press Trust of India said.

It said Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Mr Tharoor, had accused Mehr Tarar of “stalking” her husband and of trying to “break” her marriage when she was away for treatment for three months.

Earlier, The Indian Express quoted Ms Tharoor as claiming on Wednesday that her husband was having an “extra-marital affair” with a Pakistan-based journalist and that she would “seek divorce”.

Ms Tharoor was speaking to The Indian Express shortly after the minister claimed his Twitter account had been hacked. His claim came after purported controversial tweets were posted from his account and were believed to be addressed to the Pakistan-based journalist.

“Sorry folks, my @Twitter account has been hacked & will be temporarily deactivated. Bear with me while we solve this,” the minister tweeted.

The Express said that the “hacked” tweets caused his wife to react to them with tweets of her own. In one of them, she said the Pakistani journalist was “stalking” her husband.

“I completely stand by my tweets, I 100 per cent stand by that,” she later told the paper. “That woman pursued and pursued him…men are stupid anyways…for all you know she is a Pakistani agent. Where’s love, where’s loyalty in this world…I am so distraught.”

Ms Tharoor said she felt “destroyed as a wife and a woman” over her husband’s “rip-roaring affair” with the Pakistani journalist which she claimed had been going on since April last year.

Sunanda Tharoor also claimed there had been a series of Blackberry Messenger exchanges between her husband and the Pakistani in which, among other things, the possibilities of his divorce with her had also been discussed.

Asked about her next move, she told the paper that she would seek a divorce from Shashi Tharoor. The Congress minister of state for human resource development and MP from Thiruvananthapuram married the Dubai-based entrepreneur in August 2010.

PTI said that Lahore-based Tarar is a mother of a 13-year-old son and a former Op-ed writer and a contributor to a Pakistani daily.

Ms Pushkar said Mr Tharoor and she are a “very happily married couple” and accused the journalist of trying to berate her for some strange reasons. She further alleged that Ms Tarar wanted to have a “relationship” with her husband and asked her to stay away.

PTI quoted Ms Tarar as dismissing the allegations as untrue and said she was totally amused. She reportedly said Ms Pushkar had gone out of her mind.

According to PTI, Ms Tarar said she would file a defamation suit against Ms Pushkar for defaming her by alleging that she was an agent of ISI.

“I have nothing to say to a woman clearly out of her mind. To be called an ISI agent, a stalker… I have nothing to add. Just shows who she is,” Ms Tarar tweeted.“So I ‘stalk’ on bbm and phone. The last I checked it was a two-way thing, or maybe technology changed while I ’stalked’?

“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.

Ms Tarar said she had great respect for Mr Tharoor and that everything about him on her Twitter account was on her timeline. She said Mr Tharoor’s view on politics had always fascinated her.

AFP adds: Mr Tharoor had to resign from his first ministerial post after revelations that then-girlfriend Sunanda had been given a free stake in a new Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team.

Opposition parties said the stake, reportedly worth up to $15 million, was for Mr Tharoor’s behind-the-scenes services in putting together a consortium that bought a franchise in his home state of Kerala.

“I took upon myself the crimes of this man during IPL. I will not allow this to be done to me,” Ms Tharoor told the Economic Times.