By INDER MALHOTRA
SO Mr Sashi Tharoor has gone at last, or rather he has been forced to go. During the earlier eight days when the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh was busy overseas, the young, eloquent and brash Minister of State for External Affairs was brazenly defending his highly questionable actions.

When summoned by the most senior cabinet minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, and Defence Minister, Mr A K Antony, he tersely told them that he was ‘not quitting’. No wonder they both told Dr Manmohan Singh a day after his return home that that they had found Mr Tharoor’s defence of himself ‘untenable’. No less remarkably, only after a one-to-one meeting with Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi and a two-hour meeting of the Congress Core Group did the good doctor send for Mr Tharoor and asked him to put in his papers. 
A Promising Start
I say this and what follows with sorrow, and I must explain why. Mr Tharoor is the son of a dear friend and colleague of mine from my days in ‘The Statesman’ who is, alas, no more. Since his early childhood I have known Mr Tharoor to be exceptionally intelligent and hardworking. His subsequent career as an author and international civil servant amply vindicated the promise he had shown. But the Indian government’s predictably failed attempt to pitchfork him into the post of the UN Secretary-General, and his subsequent electoral victory in Kerala, followed by his appointment as minister of state at the Foreign Office evidently went to his head. There can be no other explanation for a man of his erudition and gift for articulation going haywire, to put it no more strongly than that. 
Almost from the word go he started talking out of turn and doing so superciliously. Either nobody told him to act responsibly and with restraint or he did not care to listen to such advice, presumably in the belief that he had sufficient pull with the top leadership of the Congress and the government to do what he pleased. This inevitably eclipsed the good work he in fact did as the junior minister in charge of Africa. On one occasion, the Foreign Minister did remonstrate with Mr Tharoor when the latter publicly decried the visa policy of the Union home ministry, but this evidently had little effect.
In retrospect I feel that Mr Tharoor would have been luckier if the Prime Minister had sacked him on that day itself. That was the day when on a visit to Riyadh Dr Singh had yet to meet King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the two were scheduled to issue a joint statement. The rest of the PM’s entourage waited patiently, but not Mr Tharoor who is made of sterner stuff. Perhaps in reply to a media person’s question he made a statement that could be, and was, interpreted as an invitation to Saudi Arabia to be some kind of a go-between this country and Pakistan. Amidst growing protests back home the Prime Minister clarified that nobody had ever thought of Saudi mediation. Mr Tharoor’s disdainful reaction made out as if of the billion plus Indians he alone understood the meaning of the word interlocutor.
Can of Worms
Now he has had to go under a cloud, after involving himself in a murky and sleazy mix of cricket, money from mysterious sources and personal friendship with Dubai-based, Ms Sunanda Pushkar. The dreary and depressing details of the alleged misconduct and misuse of ministerial office have been discussed threadbare in the print media as well as by competing TV channels. Investigating journalists and women columnists have excavated unflattering accounts of Ms Pushkar’s rise in the Dubai society. It is pointless to repeat what has already been stated. Except that Mr Tharoor should realise even at this late stage that there are no buyers even in his own party, leave alone those outside it, of his angry rejoinder that his reputation is being besmirched only by those out to malign him, that he has not received a single rupee, and that he was only a distant ‘mentor’ of a Kerala IPL team (in which all investors, incidentally, were from Gujarat). Nor has Ms Pushkar’s last-minute act of self-abnegation in relation to the Rs 70-crore ‘sweet equity’ been of any help. For the simple reason that its initial and surreptitious allotment to her suffered from several legal infirmities. 
There are two other aspects of the whole malodorous affair that need immediate attention and action. Though it is a relatively minor matter, the conduct of a political buddy from Dubai whom Mr Tharoor appointed Officer on Special Duty in the MEA, was objectionable, indeed offensive. For, he waded unashamedly into political or personal controversies that had nothing whatever to with either his own or his boss’s official duties, and made scathing statements against the MoS’s critics. Such appointments should be vetted carefully in future.
Far more crucial, indeed vital, is that Mr Tharoor’s exit cannot be the end of the matter. The running of the IPL (Indian Premier League) that is really a can of worms has to be subjected to the closest scrutiny. The Income-Tax authorities are already at work, and Mr Pranab Mukherjee has promised that no wrongdoer would be spared. But such promises have been made before but seldom kept. It must not be overlooked that nothing about the Kochi team or its investors was in the news for as long as Mr Tharoor and the IPL czar, Mr Lalit Modi (described by his critics as a ‘convicted drug peddler’) were in a cozy relationship. The muck hit the fan only when Mr Modi, a tweeter like Mr Tharoor, spilled the beans and named the directors of the Kochi outfit, including Ms Pushkar. The whole country knows that powerful politicians, belonging to all political parties, have found the control of cricket very lucrative. Big business and sundry operators and fixers are also making hay while the sun shines.
Politics-Cricket Nexus
Far too many questions have already been raised about the roles of Union Agriculture Minister and the Nationalist Congress Party leader, Mr Sharad Pawar, and his lieutenant and Union Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Praful Patel in relation to politics-cricket nexus. Will they be called to account despite the need for NCP votes in both the Lok Sabha and the Maharashtra assembly? The late V P Singh, during his short stint as prime minister, used to talk of ‘compulsions of coalition politics’. Will these compulsions obviate the need for probity in public life in India in perpetuity, like some of the ‘sweet equities’ handed out to preferred shareholders in various IPL teams?  And what about cricket heroes and Bollywood stars and industrial tycoons neck-deep in this scandal of gargantuan dimensions?
A lot of IPL money has come from the Gulf, from the Mauritius route because of the very convenient double-taxation agreement with that country and from other tax havens such as Cayman Islands. A large proportion of it comes through hawala that makes its origin highly suspect. There are some reports that some of the money might indeed have come from the D-company.