NEW DELHI (AFP) Scandals have ruined many a political career in India, but Shashi Tharoor is the first minister to be brought down via Twitter. A former UN undersecretary general, Tharoor had brought a rare touch of Internet-savvy flamboyance to his brief tenure as junior foreign minister, which was frowned on by more traditional elements in the Congress Party-led government. Known in the media as Twitter Tharoor, he showed a particular penchant for the microblogging site that he felt allowed him to engage with ordinary people. His Twitter page showed he had more than 720,000 followers at the time of his resignation late Sunday over allegations of corruption linked to the multibillion-dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament. Since taking up his post, his outspoken tweets on various issues had sometimes got him into trouble with the Congress hierarchy, but the message that forced him to step down came from another keen user of the ubiquitous social networking tool. IPL chief Lalit Modi used his Twitter site to leak details of the stakeholders in a consortium that Tharoor had helped put together for a successful bid for a new IPL franchise. One of those named as receiving a free stake worth around 15 million dollars was a friend of Tharoors said by Indian media to be his girlfriend. A Twitter-sweet end, observed a headline in the Times of India. While Twitter and other social networking tools like Facebook have become popular with politicians in many countries, they have generally been viewed with suspicion in the worlds largest democracy. Indias political elite have never been particularly keen on any instrument that breaks down the bureaucratic barriers between themselves and those they rule. Tharoors tweets soon became a regular news item in India as newspapers and TV channels competed to uncover messages that might get the minister into hot water. An early contender was a tweet that criticised his own governments visa policy. Then, in the middle of a Congress-led austerity drive that required ministers to fly economy class, Tharoor upset Hindu sensibilities by tweeting that he was travelling cattle class in solidarity with all our holy cows.