Congress MP Shashi on Tharoor Saturday mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling him a "hero on a white stallion with an upraised sword in his hand".
Tharoor had waded into a controversy at the Bangalore Literature Festival Sunday last by claiming that an unnamed RSS leader had compared Modi to "a scorpion sitting on a Shivling" and "you cannot remove him with your hand and you cannot hit it with a chappal either".
A criminal defamation complaint had been filed against him in a Delhi court earlier in the day for his "scorpion" remark.
Tharoor again took a swipe at the prime minister, calling him "a hero on a white stallion with an upraised sword in his hand saying I know all the answers".
"Modi is a one-man government and everybody dancing to what he says," he said at an event organised by an industry body, adding India now has the "most centralised PMO" in history.
"Every decision is taken by the PMO (prime minister's office). Every file has to be sent to the PMO for approval," he claimed.
On the next parliamentary election, Tharoor said that there will be both pre-poll and post-poll alliances between the Congress and other opposition parties, but Congress president Rahul Gandhi "may not be" the prime ministerial face.
The coming Lok Sabha election is important in that it will deny the Bharatiya Janata Party a second term in power, the Congress MP said.
He said the decision on the prime ministerial face of the Congress alliance would be a collective one and "it may not be him (Gandhi). The Congress has a broader notion of a leader unlike the BJP. We had people like Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram and others having tremendous track record".
Gandhi is the unquestionable choice of Congress workers as their leader. "If free and fair elections are held among the Congress workers, Rahul Gandhi wins hands down," the Congress MP said.
Continuing his criticism of the Modi government, Tharoor said, "We are having a top-down, over-centralised and inefficient government running the country and there is nothing positive in the Indian economy."
"Demonetisation was a bad idea implemented badly and GST was a good idea implemented badly," Tharoor said.
He said that the Indian stock is down across the globe. "The rupee was heading towards the 'Margdarshak Mandal' (a reference to a BJP panel comprising its elderly leaders)," he quipped and later clarified that the BJP panel had leaders above the age of 75.
He said that communalism, cow vigilantism and mob lynching have been so extreme that India had never seen such "bizarre politics in the past".
"There are damning statistics to prove that," he added.