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Karnataka’s Cooperation Minister Lakshman Savadi, Women and Child Development Minister C.C. Patil, and Mangalore-in-charge Minister Krishna Palemar have now resigned, after they were spotted watching porn on a cellphone, during assembly proceedings.
The opposition cannot contain its glee: Veerappa Moily called the ministers “shameless”, Kapil Sibal made a jibe about the BJP and “all kinds of entertainment”, while the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee actually demanded the assembly be dissolved after this desecration. Meanwhile, Kiran Bedi takes this as evidence of the perils of electing the “morally degraded”, and for the rest of us, it’s open season for off-colour jokes.
By itself, this should only prompt some eye-rolling — there’s no real ethical breach, apart from the fact that they were surfing for entertainment on the House’s time. (Though legally, at least one of the ministers could be in trouble for transmitting objectionable online content.) The scandal is only in what the incident says about the gap between rhetoric and reality in the Karnataka BJP — that a group of ministers can go from a public debate about “morality” (in their view, threatened by cultural pollution, sexual freedom, etc) to furtively eyeballing exactly what they claim to despise. The hypocrisy in Karnataka is almost Victorian in its intense public sanctimony and its private flouting of those norms. Only last month, Patil had put forward the idea that working women should know how much skin to cover, and that provocative clothing was the reason sexual assault was rising. Karnataka has become a mini-Maharashtra, where right-wing cultural forces have set out to define what’s permissible. This is the state where harmless things like Valentine’s Day and a drink at a pub are met with violence. There’s a continuum of such cultural activism, from those angry squads to the BJP’s mainstream politics. Only a couple of days ago, the CM warned that “nothing that went against Indian culture would be tolerated.” In a state roiled by corruption in mining, land and real estate, much of the BJP is largely preoccupied with culture wars. This incident is bound to be seized on to embarrass the party, only because of the delicious object-lesson it offers in political hypocrisy.
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