The media has named the latest episode in the serial of scandals unfolding on Karnataka’s political stage as ‘porngate.’ This is the incident in which two ministers of the BJP Government were caught on television cameras while watching porn video clips on their mobile phones in the Legislative Assembly. The clips were allegedly sent to them by another minister. All the three ministers have since resigned. No previous scandal of the BJP Government has generated so much outrage from the public and the opposition parties as this one has. The incident itself has revealed nothing new about the BJP Government in Karnataka. What is more interesting and revealing is the way the opposition and the people have reacted to this incident. Important lessons are to be learnt not from the incident itself but from the reactions to it as well.
The first set of reaction to be analyzed is that of the BJP. For the conservative middle class voters of the BJP, mainly the women voters, this came as a rude jolt. They are now quite used to hearing the stories of corruption. An incident of corruption surpassing all the previous records would not have really embarrassed them as much. Deep inside them they will never be able to reconcile with the feeling of let down that this incident has caused. In this sense, “porngate” has hit the BJP where it can hurt the most. It can be electorally more damaging than all its previous records of scams and shames put together.
However, the official reaction of the BJP was on the predictable lines. Having asked the three ministers to quit, it quickly switched to a defensive mode. The BJP supporters started rummaging history to cite all instances of illicit relationships and sexual misadventures of the opposition leaders to prove how their opponents had all kinds of weaknesses that their own leaders are now displaying in public. This sort of literally childish defense has become characteristic of the State BJP’s political existence of late. Be it corruption, electoral malpractices or anything wrong committed by the party leaders, the BJP’s publicity machinery would parrot out that one-line poser: who hasn’t done it? It reflects the BJP’s utter frustration of having to defend the most indefensible as much as its downright lack of political strategies.
Let us turn to the response from outside the BJP. The scale of protests from the opposition parties and the public has been unprecedented. The session of the Legislature had to be curtailed as the ruling party was in no position to face the opposition’s attack. People protested on the streets all over in the most imaginative ways possible to shame the three ministers and the BJP. The national media went overboard. The opposition parties have also boycotted a committee of the Legislative Assembly constituted to probe the incident. The refrain everywhere is the same — the incident has lowered the dignity of the Assembly and ruined the sanctity of the “temple of democracy.” Of course, who can dispute this? But there is an important question that needs to be asked at this juncture: Is this the only incident which has defiled the temple of democracy? Or is there anything wrong in the way everyone seems to have perceived this incident vis-à-vis other comparable incidents?
The legal and moral dimensions of the episode are vague. The clear issue here is that the three ministers have shown utter disdain towards the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly. Their behavior shows how power has intoxicated them to the point of not being able to discern what is propriety and what is not. It reflects their arrogance which made them think that they would get away with whatever they wanted to do anywhere. The point, however, is that it is not the act of watching porn per se which mirrors their disrespect to the House. What is disrespectful to the House and dangerous to democracy is the kind of mentality that prompted them to do so. And, “porngate” is just one incident in a long chain of such incidents which have amply displayed such a mentality. It is also erroneous to think that what happens inside the House contributes to lower its dignity more than such incidents outside the House. True, the “temple of democracy has a sanctity which should be protected. But, the legislature gets the sanctity of a place of worship only if one accepts that democracy is the presiding deity of that temple. Neither the people nor the opposition ever bothered, or at least showed this kind of outrage, when the deity itself was meted out the most disrespectful treatment. In what way is the defilement of democracy that Karnataka has witnessed because of the ruling party’s dubious “Operation Kamala” less serious than “porngate”? Where was the public outrage then? Why is the Opposition protest against Speaker K.G. Bopaiah presiding over the House despite scathing indictment by the Supreme Court for his partisan action is so muted? Why are the public not agitated when members of the legislature, cutting across party-lines, indulge in violent behavior?
If the so called “porngate” exposes the BJP’s double standards, the reactions to the incident expose even more the double standards of the opposition parties and the society in general. It is no one’s case that one should not have protested against the behavior of the three ministers but the disproportionate nature of that protest should be questioned. Disproportionate it is not because there has been too much of it but because there was too little of such protests in similar incidents in the past. It is the Indian society’s oversensitivity towards anything to do with sex and its utter inability to understand the basics of democracy which has resulted in such a lopsided reaction. There is no point in showing great respect to the temple of democracy while no one bothers when what is worshipped in that temple is being subjected to all kinds of assaults everywhere.
(The writer is a member of the faculty of social sciences at Azim Premji University, Bangalore)
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