Bengaluru: The crowds who packed under the rainbow-themed arena at the Bangalore Literature Festival to see Shashi Tharoor were not disappointed. His opening statement was enough to send the Twitterati into a frenzy. It was the RSS, he says, which hit upon an extraordinary striking metaphor to describe their inability to curb Mr Modi. “They say Mr Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivaling. You can't move it with your hand and you can’t hit it with a chappal either.” With the audiences reaching for their phones immediately, to tweet the event, it wasn’t long before Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad sought an apology. It was a controversial reference to a profile on Modi published in The Caravan back in 2012, titled “The Emperor Uncrowned,” by Vinod Jose, who wrote, “Shortly before I left Gujarat, one RSS leader described his own feelings in a bitter sigh: ‘Shivling mein bicchu baitha hai. Na usko haath utaar sakte ho, na usko jutta maar sakte ho.’
He had previously promise that his latest book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, would not just be “400 pages of floccinauccinihilipilification,” much to Twitter's delight. Tharoor has faced some flack for appearing to give the PM the benefit of the doubt. “I welcomed some of his statements immediately after his election in 2014, for they were conciliatory. These are the yardsticks by which he was judged and held accountable to his promises of inclusiveness. The disenchantment did not take long to set in.”
