Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Saturday took a swipe at the party’s Lok Sabha candidate from Jaipur, Sunil Sharma, after social media users flagged his alleged association with a forum that frequently ridicules opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi.

Sunil Sharma’s name in the third list of Congress’s candidates for Lok Sabha elections set off a social media storm on Saturday, with many questioning the party’s decision to field someone who is allegedly associated with right-wing forum The Jaipur Dialogues.

Most of the content posted from the official X handle of The Jaipur Dialogues is targeted at opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal.

“He must have undergone some sort of Pauline epiphany on the road to 24 Akbar!” Tharoor said on X, sharing one of the “several dozen tweets from his handle attacking” the Thiruvananthapuram MP.

In the social media post highlighted by Tharoor, The Jaipur Dialogues says, “Shashi Tharoor is just Rahul Gandhi with thesaurus he stole from a library on his way out.”

A video of a reporter questioning Sunil Sharma about his alleged association with the right-wing forum has been doing rounds on social media. In the video, Sharma appears taken aback by the inquiry and rushes away after abruptly ending the interview.

Sharma is yet to respond to the charges.

After being chosen by the Congress high command to contest from Jaipur in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, Sunil Sharma on Friday asserted that the people of Jaipur are eager to bring change in the impending election.

“Jaipur has not been able to secure its place among the top 25 clean cities in the country, which is quite painful. If Jaipur continues like this, it will not remain liveable, hence the people of Jaipur want a change. And I believe that this election will be an election of momentous change,” he told ANI.

Among other the Congress candidates from Rajasthan are Kuldeep Indora for the Ganganagar constituency, Sangeeta Beniwal for Pali, Umeda Ram Beniwal for Barmer, and Urmila Jain Bhaya for the Jhalawar-Baran constituency. The Sikar constituency has been allocated to the CPI-M.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has yet to announce its candidate for the Jaipur constituency. The Lok Sabha elections in Rajasthan are scheduled to be held in two phases on April 19 and April 26.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP secured 24 seats and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP), a member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), won one seat. The Indian National Congress (INC) did not win any seats.