Senior Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who has made it a habit to embarrass the Congress by praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and going against the party line, has struck again.

In a post on X, Tharoor praised the Prime Minister’s Ramnath Goenka Lecture in which Modi also referred to the Congress as the "Muslim League Maoist Congress".

The Congress, both in Kerala and the national capital, did not respond to Tharoor’s latest provocation, preferring to ignore his comments over fuelling it with attention.

This is the second time this month that Tharoor has spoken out of turn. On November 9, he had wished former deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani on his birthday with high praise for his "unwavering commitment to public service". It forced the Congress to state that the Thiruvananthapuram MP spoke for himself and the party "outrightly disassociates" with his comments about the BJP veteran.

Stating that he had attended the lecture organised by The Indian Express, Tharoor on Tuesday said the Prime Minister spoke of India's "constructive impatience" for development and strongly pushed for a post-colonial mindset. "The PM emphasised that India is no longer just an 'emerging market' but an 'emerging model' for the world, noting its economic resilience. Modi said he’d been accused of being in 'election mode' all the time, but he was really in 'emotional mode' to redress people's problems," he said.

As always, Tharoor sought to tone down his praise for Modi by presenting a contrarian view on the language issue. Underscoring the fact that a significant part of the speech was dedicated to overturning Macaulay’s 200-year legacy of "slave mentality", Tharoor said Modi appealed for a 10-year national mission to restore pride in India’s heritage, languages and knowledge systems. "I wish he had also acknowledged how Ramnath Goenka had used English to raise a voice for Indian nationalism!" he said.

"On the whole, the PM’s address served as both an economic outlook and a cultural call to action, urging the nation to be restless for progress. Glad to have been in the audience despite battling a bad cold and cough!” he added.

Over the past six months, Tharoor has on numerous occasions heaped praise on Modi. Enjoying the discomfort Tharoor was causing his own party, the government chose him to lead one of the seven foreign delegations to present its case for isolating Pakistan over the Pahalgam terror attack. Later, Tharoor claimed that Modi’s energy and dynamism had been an “asset for India”.

After the Congress and the INDIA bloc's severe drubbing in the Bihar polls, Tharoor urged his party to review its dismal performance.