"What is your Gotra?", Dr Sambit Patra asks Rahul Gandhi after Shashi Tharoor's 'Scorpion-chappal-Shivling' analogy

A day after senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor referenced an unsourced analogy calling PM Modi 'a scorpion sitting on Shivling which is difficult to set aside', BJP national spokesperson Dr Sambit Patra has demanded that Rahul Gandhi reveal his 'Gotra'.

On a day when the Congress president was in Ujjain in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh to offer prayers at the Mahakaleshwar Temple, Dr Sambit Patra, speaking at an event in Indore, demanded to know Gandhi's 'gotra', which essentially means 'clan'.

"Ujjain ja rahe Rahul Gandhi ji se hum poochna chahte hain ki aap janaeu-dhari hain? Aap kaise janaeu-dhari hain, kya gotra hai aapka? (Rahul Gandhi is going to Ujjain. I want to know if he is Janaeu-dhari. I want to know what kind of Janaeu-dhari is he. What is your Gotra?)," said BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra in Indore.

Earlier in the day, the BJP national spokesperson demanded Rahul Gandhi to expel Shashi Tharoor from the party. Demanding Tharoor’s ouster, Dr Patra said 'if Rahul Gandhi is a Shiv-bhakt, he must act against Shashi Tharoor.'

“If Rahul Gandhi is actually a Shiv bhakt, then he should apologise and should expel Shashi Tharoor from the party. Tell me, will Shashi Tharoor ever comment on any other gods or religion like this?” said Dr Sambit Patra.

READ | "Like A Scorpion On A Shivling": Shashi Tharoor Directs Controversial 'chappal-scorpion-Shivling' Analogy At PM Modi

Speaking in an event in Bengaluru, while promoting his new book, Tharoor triggered a massive war of words, drawing a controversial analogy PM Modi and 'a scorpion sitting on a Shivling'

"This personality cult (speaking about Narendra Modi) hasn't sat well with many in the RSS establishment. 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 with your hand and you can't hit him with a chappal either. And if you think about it, that's a very very profound understanding of the relationship, because if you remove a scorpion with a hand you'll get stung very badly but if you hit a Shivling with a chappal then you've undermined all the sacred tenets of the faith that the scorpion is sitting on. So, ultimately you live with it with seething frustration. That may well be a very interesting clue to the rather complex dynamic that exists between the Hindutva movement and the Moditva expression of it’," said Tharoor.

The 'Shiv-bhakt' and 'Janaeu-dhari' references have to do with the Congress president being extolled with such descriptors by members of his party, particularly by Randeep Surjewala, ahead of the Gujarat elections in 2017. Rahul Gandhi also undertook the Kailash Mansarovar yatra a few months ago.