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'Why be touchy? Let's close it': Supreme Court on BJP leader's defamation case against Shashi Tharoor
The Supreme Court suggested closing the criminal defamation case against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor regarding his 2018 remark about PM Modi.
The Supreme Court on Friday asked a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who had filed a criminal defamation case against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor for his 2018 comment targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to consider closing the case.
“Why do you want to be so touchy about this. Let us close this,” a bench of justices MM Sundresh and N Kotiswar Singh told Delhi BJP leader Rajiv Babbar’s lawyers.
“That way, administrators, political personalities and judges are in the same group. They are sufficiently thick-skinned,” the bench said at Friday’s brief hearing before adjourning the case on a request from Tharoor’s lawyer.
The Thiruvananthapuram MP approached the top court challenging a Delhi high court verdict that rejected his plea to quash the defamation case. The top court stayed the trial in September 2024 and had sought the response of Babbar and the Delhi government.
The case was initiated on the Delhi BJP leader’s complaint, who cited Tharoor’s remarks at the Bangalore Literature Festival in 2018, where he allegedly made the “scorpion on Shivling” remarks about the PM. Babbar said the remark not only targeted the PM, but also hurt his religious sentiments.
Tharoor has reasoned that his remark was borrowed from an article published about Modi in 2012, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. The magazine carried a statement by an unnamed RSS leader who compared PM Modi to a “scorpion sitting on a Shivling”.
He also argued that Babbar’s complaint could not be entertained as he was not an “aggrieved person” under the law when the person against whom the statement is made has not taken any action. He also relied on the exception under the law on defamation which makes any comment made in good faith not a criminal offence.
The Delhi high court had rejected similar arguments in its verdict last year, holding that the “imputations against a sitting Prime Minister are despicable and deplorable” and have a bearing on the image of the BJP, its members and its functionaries.
“The comment exemplifies that Shri Narendra Modi is unacceptable with many in the RSS establishment and compares the expression of their frustration, as dealing with a leader with the characteristics of a scorpion possessing a venomous instinct. The comments apparently not only defame Shri Narendra Modi, but the party represented by him i.e. BJP, including RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the members of the party for having accepted the leadership,” the high court said in its verdict on August 29, 2024.
