Porn Row: House Panel Exonerates Cong MLA Naba Kishore Das

Bhubaneswar: Congress MLA from Jharsuguda Naba Kishore Das has been exonerated of the charge of watching porn inside the House during the Assembly session in 2015 due to lack of evidence.

He was given the clean chit by the Ethics Committee of Odisha Assembly which went into the allegations following a footage aired by a private channel.

According to sources, the panel prepared a 9 page report following a meeting held on December 18. The report said that the CCTV footage did not show the MLA indulging in such an act. The television channel also failed to provide footage to substantiate the allegation.

Das had sought to defend himself after the issue stirred a row, saying it was not a deliberate act. “I was browsing my phone when by mistake I touched YouTube app and this clip popped up. The video is on YouTube. The company has sent it and I did not choose it deliberately,” he had said.

During its probe, the panel also reviewed the House committee report of Karnataka assembly on legislators watching porn during House sessions.

Das is not the only legislator accused of the “dirty act”.

Early in 2012, three BJP ministers in the Karnataka Assembly put the entire country to shame as they were caught watching porn on a mobile phone. This incident, unheard of in any assemblies, triggered a nation-wide outrage.

An embarrassed BJP leadership tried to minimise the damage to its image by asking cooperation minister Laxman Savadi, women and child development minister CC Patil and Ports, science and technology minister Krishna Palemar, who supposedly provided the porn film, to resign.

If people felt their resignation would be a lesson for other legislators, they were proved wrong.

A month later, two BJP MLAs were caught in the same eye-rolling ethical breach inside the Gujarat assembly. Shankar Choudhury, MLA from Radhanpur, and Jetha Dharwad from Shehra were allegedly watching obscene pictures on a tablet with the assembly in session.

Lab reports, however, failed to find any porn content in the ipad, following which they were cleared of the charge.