A Delhi court granted bail to Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday on a complaint over his alleged ‘scorpion’ remarks referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal granted relief to Tharoor on a personal bond of Rs 20,000 after he appeared before the court and moved bail application.
The court was hearing a criminal defamation complaint filed against Tharoor by Delhi BJP leader Rajeev Babbar, who had said his religious sentiments were hurt by the Congress leader’s statement.
Last year in October, Mr. Tharoor landed in a controversy on Sunday after he referred to the quote of an unnamed RSS functionary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a nearly six-year-old magazine article.
“This personality cult has not sat very well with many in the RSS establishment. There is an extraordinarily striking metaphor expressed by an unnamed RSS source in which they express their frustration with their inability to curb Mr. Modi,” Mr. Tharoor said while speaking about his latest book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and his India , at the Bangalore Lit Fest on October 28.
“The man [unnamed RSS source] says Mr. Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivling . You cannot remove him with your hand and you cannot hit with a chappal eitherAnd If you think about it, that’s a very very profound understanding of the relationship. Because if you try to remove a scorpion with your hand, you will get stung yourself badly. If you hit the Shivling with chappal, then you undermine all the sacred tenets of the faith that you hold [on Shivling ] on which scorpion is sitting.”
