The Supreme Court on Friday suggested that the defamation case filed against Congress leader Shashi Tharoor for his purported remark comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a scorpion sitting on a Shivaling should be closed as politicians, judges and administrators have the same “thick skin”.

A bench of Justice M.M. Sundresh and Justice N. Kotiswar Singh orally suggested this to BJP leader Rajeev Babbar, who had filed the criminal defamation case against Tharoor last year.

“Let us close this (case). Why do you get touchy about all these things? That way, you are aware that administrators, political personalities and judges all form the same group. They have sufficiently developed a thick skin,” Justice Sundresh, heading the bench, told senior advocate Pinky Anand appearing for Babbar.

Anand, however, did not agree with the suggestion but pleaded that the matter be heard on a non-miscellaneous day (when relatively older matters are taken up). The counsel for Tharoor requested an adjournment, following which the court adjourned the matter for four weeks with the directive that the interim stay granted on September 10 last year would continue.

On September 10 last year, the court had stayed the defamation proceedings against Tharoor for his 2018 remark wherein he had cited the purported comment of an RSS functionary that Modi was a “scorpion sitting on a Shivling; you cannot remove him with your hand, and you cannot hit it with a chappal either”.

At the last hearing, too, the court had remarked: “Eventually it is a metaphor, that as I have tried to understand. The metaphor would refer to the invincibility of the person who is spoken of (Modi).

“Can’t the metaphor not be understood as pointing out the invincibility of the person?” Justice Hrishikesh Roy (since retired), heading a bench, orally observed while staying the proceedings until further orders.

The bench had stayed the proceedings before the trial court in Delhi, which summoned Tharoor to appear before it on September 10 last year to face the defamation case filed by Babbar.

According to Tharoor, the complaint was baseless as it was filed in connection with his utterances in 2018 wherein he had merely made a reference to a statement published six years earlier in 2012 in The Caravan magazine.