Democracies are not for prudes. And if markets are to be freed, so must the other pleasures of life. So, it is difficult to put an adult finger on what the deeper problem is with three ministers watching a pornographic clip on a mobile phone in the state assembly in Karnataka. It is, of course, a gross breach of discipline to be watching anything on a cellphone while the assembly is in session (mobile phones are apparently not allowed in). But the fact that the ministers were watching an allegedly violent piece of pornography makes the whole incident darker in its implications — certainly less comic and more sordid. Matters become even more sinister and unsavoury when one of them, a minister for women and child development, is known to have extreme views on how women should dress so as not to provoke men to rape them. To come to a correct assessment of how much skin women should cover for the sake of female dignity obviously requires preparation, and that is what the three men claim to have been doing with the cellphone. They were learning about licentious behaviour at raves, particularly by foreigners, so as to deal with such misdemeanours rightly.

This is, perhaps, what is most alarming about an episode like this — what it says about the nature of the power that the State gives to its elected representatives, and how moral policing and relishing sexually violent entertainment are the obverse and reverse of the same kind of power. Most instances of moral policing in India, conducted by rightwing zealots of whatever hue, have a collective, cadre-based, hooligan-like quality. But this is a different kind of sordidness, somehow made more sordid by the specific setting and context of the incident, and by the public, political role that the men have been invested with. Incidents like this also prove to be a setback for justly liberal campaigns in democratic societies still in the process of realizing their own modernity. It is possible to imagine lunatic fringes of bigoted formations stepping up their call for stricter censorship or whipping up unacceptable forms of xenophobia in the name of the sanctity of Indian culture.