Complaint filed in court against Tharoor's scorpion comment

New Delhi [India], Nov 3 (ANI): A criminal defamation complaint has been moved by Delhi BJP leader Rajeev Babbar in city's Patiala House Court against Congress leader Shashi Tharoor over his 'scorpion' remark on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Babbar said that Tharoor's remarks hurt his religious sentiments.
The court fixed November 16 as the date to decide whether to admit the petition.
"I am a devotee of Lord Shiva... However, the accused (Tharoor) completely disregarded the sentiments of crores of Shiva's devotees, made the statement which hurt the sentiments of all the Lord Shiva devotees, both in India and outside the country, the Complainant's religious sentiments were hurt and accused deliberately did this malicious act, intending to outrage religious feeling of Lord Shiva devotees by insulting their religious believes," Babbar's complaint read.
Advocate Neeraj, who is counsel of Babbar, in the statement has mentioned that the annotations are "intolerable abuse" and "absolute vilification of the faith of millions of people".
On October 28, Tharoor had claimed that an unnamed RSS leader had compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to 'a scorpion sitting on a Shivling' while speaking at the Bengaluru Literary Festival.
Recalling what an RSS member had told a journalist in 2012, he elucidated: "There's an extraordinarily striking metaphor expressed by an unnamed RSS source to a journalist, who expressed their frustration to curb Modi -- 'Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a shivling. You can't remove him with your hand and you cannot hit it with a 'chappal' (slipper) either."
Tharoor added, "If you try to touch the scorpion, you will be stung, but if you hit a shivling with the chappal, it undermines all the sacred tenets of the faith. That may well be an interesting clue to the rather complex dynamics that exist between the Hindutva movement and the Moditva expression on it."
Continuing his tirade, the Congress leader said that he focused more on the Prime Minister's personal character rather than the Hindutva movement in his book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister. (ANI)