Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday demanded an apology from law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for allegedly misleading the nation by accusing him and party president Rahul Gandhi of “almost” abusing the “sanctity of the Shivling and Lord Mahadev by referring to a chappal attack through an unnamed source”.

While Tharoor had on Sunday itself pointed out that he was only quoting something that has been in the public domain — that too attributed to an unnamed RSS leader — for six years now, on Tuesday he dug out a video recording of former Gujarat minister and BJP leader Gordhan Zadafia making the same scorpion analogy.

In an interview to NewsX channel in 2010, Zadafia, who by then had left the BJP to return to the RSS fold in 2014, said about then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s relationship with the Sangh: “It is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivling. Neither can the Sangh parivar touch it, nor can they throw anything to damage it.”

During an interaction in Bangalore on Sunday in connection with the release of his book The Paradoxical Prime Minister, Tharoor had referred to a similar observation cited in The Caravan magazine in March 2012 to show how Modi’s personality cult did not go down well with the Sangh.

“There’s an extraordinarily striking metaphor expressed by an unnamed RSS source to the journalist Vinod Jose of The Caravan which I quote here in which they express their frustration with their inability to curb Mr Modi. And the man says ‘Mr Modi is like a scorpion sitting on a Shivling. You cannot remove him with your hand, and you cannot hit it with a chappal either.’”

“That’s a very very profound understanding of the relationship. Because if you remove a scorpion with your hand you will get stung very badly but if you hit a Shivling with a chappal then you have undermined all the sacred tenets of the faith that you hold and that the scorpion is sitting on. So ultimately you live with it, with seething frustration,’’ Tharoor had said.

This had prompted Prasad to demand an apology from Rahul, calling his claim of being a Shiv bhakt hypocritical.

Posting the video featuring Zadafia making a similar observation, Tharoor tweeted on Tuesday: “Now will @rsprasad apologise to me & @RahulGandhi since the alleged insult I quoted comes from his own camp?”