Let He Who has Never Watched Porn

...cast the first stone at the Karnataka ministers

All those aghast at three Karnataka BJP ministers, Lakshman Savadi, CC Patil and Krishna Palemar, watching porn on a mobile phone in the Assembly would do well to cast a good hard look at their lifelong acquaintance with porn. We are talking mostly men here. Women watch porn and forget it like the new Friday release. Their boyfriends and husbands, on the other hand, nurture the relationship. They will have a cache hidden in the mobile phone or laptop. And you can safely bet that each one of them has at least once, in a moment of boredom, quickly had a look at it in the office.

Or is the outrage because the ministers were doing this crime in the Assembly, that temple of democracy? There was a time in the Kerala Assembly when the favourite form of protest of legislators was to raise their mundu and show their unmentionables. Jayalalitha’s sari was pulled in the Tamil Nadu Assembly when she first became leader of the opposition. In the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, they had a rollicking gang war with mikes being used as missiles. In the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly, the Speaker’s tongue demanded independence from him and started abusing a legislator in beep beep beep. The Assembly is a temple for the exercise of all sorts of freedom. Discriminating against porn goes against its very character. The ministers, who have been forced to resign, are martyrs as much as Salman Rushdie.

To the outrage over Patil watching porn despite being the state’s minister for women and child development, ask this: what’s the connection? How is consensual adult porn detrimental to women and child development? It’s not. The prime example of this is your own caring husband and his laptop.

Of all the hypocrites, BJP President Nitin Gadkari, who demanded the resignation of the ministers, is the worst. Here’s a man who hemmed and hawed when former Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa was indicted on corruption charges. He has not demanded the resignation of Gujarat CM Narendra Modi, who is accused of genocide. Watching porn, by Gadkari’s reckoning, is worse than gifting hundreds of crores to family members or being responsible for the murder of thousands. It’s a perverted worldview.