Delhi court reserves order in defamation case

A Delhi court on Wednesday reserved the order on the framing of notice in a defamation case filed against Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor over his “scorpion on shivling” remark.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Samar Vishal slated the date for the pronouncement of order on the framing of notice under Section 251 of the CrPC to August 27. The court was hearing a criminal defamation case filed by BJP leader Rajeev Babbar.

In October 2018, Tharoor had stoked a controversy by invoking a news article where an unnamed RSS leader had compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a scorpion sitting on a Shivling.

“There is 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,” he had said.

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.”

Babbar alleged that Tharoor’s remarks hurt his religious sentiments. 

However, Advocate Neeraj, representing Babbar, in the statement, had said that the annotations were “intolerable abuse” and “absolute vilification” of the faith of millions of people.