Of politicians, love affairs

On April 30th, after the TV journalist, Amrita Rai’s email account had been hacked into, she and Dijvijaya Singh, the Congress general secretary, admitted to their relationship through their respective Twitter accounts, mentioning that they looked forward to marriage and that Rai was going to get a divorce.

Their story seems to be one among many political love story scandals which demanded a lot of media attention. Let's take a look at a few others which are remembered mainly for their not-so-happily-ever-after endings.

Back in 2008, chaos ensued after Chander Mohan, the then Deputy Chief Minister of Haryana and the son of the Chief Minister, Bhajan Lal, went missing. After being dismissed from the State Cabinet for his prolonged absence from the office, he resurfaced in January 2009, and announced to the media that he was married to the Assistant Advocate General Anuradha Bali. Chander Mohan who was already married, informed the media that they had both converted to Islam to validate their marriage, and changed their names to Chand and Fiza.

A fortnight after the announcement, Chander Mohan deserted Anuradha and went back to his wife and family. He also converted back to Hinduism. Anuradha at first alleged that his family had been pressuring him to leave her, and then accused him of rape and mental harassment. In March 2009, Chander Mohan divorced Anuradha. In June, Anuradha attempted to commit suicide but failed. Then, she campaigned against Chander Mohan’s family in the 2009 assembly elections. Early in August 2012, she was found dead under mysterious circumstances in Mohali.

In 1993, the well-loved Andhra Pradesh leader and three-term Chief Minister, Nandamuri Taraka Ramarao, shocked everyone when he announced at the age of 70 that he had decided to marry Lakshmi Parvathi, a 39-year-old Telugu writer. She is the author of his two-volume biography which was published after his death. At the time, Lakshmi was a married woman with a teenage child and NTR was a widower with eleven children from his marriage with Basava Rama Tarakam.

People believe that Lakshmi and NTR came together and fell in love at the time the books were being written. However, she was never accepted by NTR’s family members who kept a distance from her after his death.

In 2008, Rohit Shekhar filed a parernity suit claiming Tiwari to be his biological father. The court ordered that a DNA mapping be done, which the court successfully compelled compliance with on 29th May, 2012. On 27th July, 2012, the Delhi High Court rejected the request from Tiwari’s lawyers to keep the results a secret, citing the need to end the public scandal. The DNA results were released, and they established that Tiwari is the biological father of Rohit Shekhar, and that Ujjawala Sharma is the biological mother. Tiwari had met Sharma during the late 1960s, and had sought refuge and guidance from her father and seasoned politician Professor Sher Singh as he was an upcoming leader then.

Tiwari urged the media to respect his privacy, saying that he has every right to live his life his own way.

In 2007, Aroosa Alam, a 50-year-old Pakistani journalist called a press conference in Chandigarh in response to her alleged affair with former Pubjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, and announced that they were only very good friends.

The duo had met in 2004, when Captain Singh was on a trip to Pakistan. Their rumoured relationship had raised many eyebrows, even raising a political storm of sorts in the Punjab Assembly.

Shashi Tharoor’s relationship with business woman Sunanda Pushkar was a tumultuous love affair that cost him his ministerial berth. Following this, Tharoor married Pushkar in his ancestral home in Kerala in August 2010. However, their marriage was short-lived after Sunanda, 52, was found dead at The Leela Hotel in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi in January 2014, after tweeting about Tharoor’s relationship with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar.