Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor set the cat among the pigeons with an analogy in which he claimed that an RSS source called PM Modi a scorpion sitting on a Shivling.

The ideological mentor of BJP, Tharoor said, found it hard to curb PM Modi.

He was quoted saying by news ANI: “Here's an extraordinarily striking metaphor expressed by an unnamed RSS source to a journalist, that, "Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivling, you can't remove him with your hand & you cannot hit it with a chappal either."

#WATCH Shashi Tharoor in Bengaluru, says, "There's an extraordinarily striking metaphor expressed by an unnamed RSS source to a journalist, that, "Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivling, you can't remove him with your hand & you cannot hit it with a chappal either."(27.10) pic.twitter.com/E6At7WrCG5

— ANI (@ANI) October 28, 2018

This led union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to rebuke him and demand an apology from Rahul Gandhi saying: “Rahul Gandhi, you claim yourself be to a Shiv bhakt (devotee). Please reply to this very horrific denunciation of Lord Mahadev.”  

This isn’t Tharoor’s first rodeo and he faced heat when he claimed PM Modi could wear ‘outlandish headgear’ but not the skull cap.

Tharoor said: “Why does our Prime Minister, who wears all sorts of outlandish headgear wherever he goes around the country, refuse to wear a Muslim skullcap? You've seen him in hilarious Naga headdress, feathers, and various kinds of extraordinary outfits.  Why does he refuse to wear the green?”

Tharoor's remarks come a day after a Congress MLA from Maharashtra, Praniti Shinde compared PM Modi to a dengue mosquito.

The Solapur South Cong MLA, who’s also former Maha CM Sushilkumar Shinde’s daughter, made the comments at an event.

She was quoted saying by India Today: “We have a new dengue mosquito in our country, whose name is Modi baba. Everyone is falling sick because of him. So do whatever you can, spray pesticides and throw him out of the power next time."

Comparisons to mosquitoes, insects and other small specimen isn’t particularly rare in Indian politics and even PM Modi had famously compared the grand old party Congress to termites during a heated election campaign in 2017 ahead of the state’s assembly polls. He had said: “If you clean just on the surface, termites come back after a few days. The Congress party's depraved mentality is like termites. You cannot just change the government and expect to be done with it, you have to take them out from the roots. Only then we can free Himachal of this disease."

In Maharashtra politics, this particular analogy is also quite popular, with Sharad Pawar calling Shiv Sena a two-faced earthworm – for criticising BJP while being an ally – which led to a Saamna editorial calling Pawar a termite.

Of course, as usual, CM Arvind Kejriwal takes the cake, given that while most leaders reserve such epithets for their political rivals, the Delhi CM self-anointed himself a ‘dengue mosquito’ and said famously in 2012, while replying to Congress’ Salman Khurshid who had called his attacks similar to a mosquito bite. He had said: “I am a dengue (causing) mosquito. I will bite BJP and Congress and they will be in trouble.”