The Thiruvananthapuram Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate court issued an arrest warrant against Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor as he failed to appear for a hearing, reports Mathrubhumi. The court had earlier issued summons to Tharoor asking him to appear before the court, but he failed to do so.
The hearing was based on a complaint that he allegedly defamed Hindu Nair women in his book 'The Great Indian Novel'. As per reports, the case was filed by Sandhya Sreekumar, a member of Nair Service Society at Perunthanni in Thiruvananthapuram at the time of the Lok Sabha elections.
'The Great Indian Novel' published in 1989 is a satirical novel which pen down Indian epic Mahabharata in the context of the independence movement.
According to the official communication from Shashi Tharoor's office, the initial court summons did not have a specific date and that was why he failed to appear before it, says a News18 report. As per the report, Tharoor's advocate had filed a plea in the court to issue a fresh summons with date, but this hasn't yet been received.
Tharoor has also been caught up in another controversy for sharing a 'distorted' map of India in Twitter on Saturday. As per reports, he posted an Indian map without Kashmir with the words 'Don't divide India' in Malayalam. But the map's erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir was distorted. He had posted the tweet as an invitation for anti-CAA protest rally in Kozhikode.
After getting trolled on social media for his post, Tharoor deleted the controversial tweet and stated that he only sought to depict the people of India in the map and not the territory. "Replaces an earlier post which sought to depict not the territory but the people of India, in whose name we would be speaking. No wish2feed BJP trolls more fodder (sic)," he said in another tweet.
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