“Shashi Tharoor has submitted his resignation to the prime minister, stepping down from the Council of Ministers. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has forwarded the resignation to President Pratibha Patil with the recommendation that it may be accepted,” a statement from the PMO said. Patil also accepted the resignation.

Tharoor, 54, a former top UN official, submitted his resignation to Singh in a nearly half-hour meeting, the second during the day that saw hectic political activity following the prime minister’s return after a weeklong trip to the US and Brazil.

The resignation came soon after top Congress party leaders held a meeting with the prime minister and party chief Sonia Gandhi and concluded that Tharoor had to go.

The Congress held a flurry of meetings on Sunday attended by senior union ministers, over the row at the center of which was Tharoor and his “mentoring” of the Kochi IPL franchise.

Only on Friday, Tharoor had put up a spirited defense of himself in the Parliament, claiming he had done no wrong and not used his office to promote the interest of Pushkar, a businesswoman who got sweat equity worth 700 million rupees in Rendezvous Sports World, a member of the consortium that won the Indian Premier League (IPL) Kochi franchise for the cash-rich Twenty20 domestic cricket tournament.

The opposition, which had been demanding the removal of Tharoor, welcomed the move.

“This is the victory of truth,” Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said. Another BJP leader Nirmala Sitharaman said his position had become “untenable and it was only appropriate that he resigned.”

Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D. Raja said the exit of Tharoor was “inevitable.”

“Since there were serious allegations of Tharoor’s involvement in the Kochi IPL franchise, his continuance in the government became untenable. The decision of Sunanda Pushkar surrendering her stake is an admission of guilt,” he said.