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Bangalore, Feb. 8: A red-faced BJP, whose extended family houses an army of self-styled moral cops, today forced three Karnataka ministers to quit, two of them for watching alleged porn clips in the Assembly and the third for carrying the pictures on his mobile.
Speaker K.G. Bopaiah also showcaused the trio — Lakshman Savadi, C.C. Patil and Krishna Palemar — and suspended them after the unrelenting Opposition pressed for their disqualification.
Bopaiah said he had formed a House panel to investigate the matter but then adjourned the Assembly two days ahead of schedule when the Opposition kept up the clamour saying it had not been consulted on the probe committee’s formation.
Sources said the adjournment had effectively put on hold the suspensions till the House committee submits its report to the Speaker by March 13.
The smut row comes around three years after the Sree Ram Sene, a little-known radical group ideologically close to the BJP, assaulted revellers at a Mangalore pub, while Sangh activists have been known to routinely target couples for celebrating Valentine’s Day.
Late this evening in Mangalore, Ram Sene chief Pramod Muthalik told journalists the Assembly was a “sacred” place. “This incident is very wrong and unfortunate.”
For the BJP, the morning began on a hectic note with legislators meeting at the party’s state headquarters to take stock of the damage since Savadi and Patil were yesterday filmed by a local channel watching the alleged smut clips in the Assembly.
At the meeting, the party extracted the resignations from the three ministers, all around 50 and married, one of them a grandfather.
While Savadi and Patil quit without a fuss, Palemar said he had been wrongly accused of carrying lewd content on his cellphone.
Sources, however, said Savadi had confessed to party elders that it was Palemar who had handed them his phone to check the clipping of a “rape and murder” scene in Iran.
The former minister claimed that watching the clips was part of preparations for taking part in a discussion on crimes against women.
The discussion was over an alleged rave party the government had allowed in the coastal Udupi district over the weekend.
A statement by chief minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda had claimed the three-day party, organised by the district administration and a private group and billed as an event to promote tourism, was attended by more than 1,500 people, including some 900 foreigners. But amateur video footage purportedly showed a foreigner couple in a compromising position. There were also allegations of nudity and use of narcotics.
But the rave video had been pushed to the background by the cellphone clips by the time the Assembly convened today.
Not satisfied by the resignations, a belligerent Opposition demanded that the Speaker disqualify the trio, said to be close to scam-tainted former chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa. Patil is a former political secretary to Yeddyurappa.
The Congress, in particular, demanded that the House be dissolved. Leader of Opposition Siddaramaiah led from the front, ensuring that no business could be transacted in the lower House. In the upper House, too, the scene was no different.
When the ruckus continued, the Speaker adjourned the House around afternoon. When the Assembly reconvened around 4pm, Bopaiah announced that he had issued showcause notices to the three and had asked them to reply by February 13.
But the Opposition pressed for disqualification. The Speaker then said he had also formed a House panel to probe the matter and asked it to report back by March 13. When the din continued, the Speaker suspended the three before adjourning the House, two days before the session was to end on Friday.
Congress leader Siddaramaiah later accused Bopaiah of failing in his duties by not disqualifying Savadi, Patil and Palemar who, he said, had “violated the sanctity of the Assembly”.
Palemar, who allegedly carried the smut clips on his mobile phone, said he would seek “justice” since he had not erred. But Opposition members pointed out that even carrying a cellphone into the Assembly was a violation of House norms.
Siddaramaiah also sought the resignation of chief minister Sadananda Gowda. “He has no moral authority to continue in that chair under the cloud of this shameful episode involving his ministers,” the Congress leader said.
The defiant chief minister blamed the Opposition for “unnecessarily hyping up” the issue.
Law minister Suresh Kumar said the “embarrassment” caused to the party couldn’t be washed away. “But we should appreciate that these ministers came forward to quit within 12 hours (of the incident being reported).”
“We heard the ministers in detail and realised that whatever has been projected by the media is not the whole truth. But the issue is that they shouldn’t have used those clippings, which they said were about crime in the Middle East,” Kumar said.
State police had a tough day guarding the residences of the former ministers. Members of the Indian Youth Congress and the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike (Karnataka Protection Forum), a fringe group of self-appointed moral police, took out protest marches in the city and other parts of the state seeking a ban on the smut-tainted trio.
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