A Zonal Officer of the Bhopal Municipal Corporation, who was allegedly caught watching porn during the corporation's meeting on Monday, has reportedly been suspended.
Alok Sharma, the Mayor of Bhopal, told ANI, "People of Bhopal have elected us for the municipality. We keep holding meetings to discuss problems of the city. In one such meeting, a zonal officer of the municipality, Anil Sharma, was watching porn. This is a serious matter. We have suspended the officer."
However, Anil Sharma is not the first public official to have been caught watching porn while at work. Here’s a list of a few other public representatives who allegedly watched porn while on duty and were caught on camera.
December 2015: Naba Kishore Das, a Congress MLA, was suspended from the Odisha Assembly for a week for allegedly watching porn clips on his mobile phone inside the House.
Das, however, defended himself stating that he had opened the page by mistake. A TOI report quoted him as saying, "While trying to open my own social media page, I accidentally touched YouTube. I scrolled down unwittingly when the TV camera shot me."
The second-time MLA went on to say, "I never watch porn. What happened is unfortunate. If an inquiry is conducted, I will come clean," he added.
March 2012: A Gujarat journalist filed a complaint with the Gujarat Assembly speaker alleging that he along with a few other journalists had seen two BJP MLAs, Shankar Chowdhary and Jetha Bhai Dharwad, watching "sleazy" photographs of women inside the assembly.
The journalist Janakbhai Purohit also released a video, which had apparently captured the incident.
"First they started by watching the pictures of Swami Vivekananda, then cartoons and then pics of women...I saw them watching some sleazy photographs of women and felt it was wrong...I went to the Speaker's chamber and complained about it to his Personal Assistant that it was a repeat of Karnataka; he informed the Speaker and the viewing was stopped. This went on for about 20 minutes...they were engrossed in watching the vulgar pictures," a NDTV report quoted Purohit as saying.
Both Chowdhary and Dharwad claimed innocence with the former saying, "This has no basis...no such incident happened...somebody is trying to defame me" and the latter offering to resign if found guilty.
February 2012: Laxman Savadi and C.C. Patil, both former BJP ministers in the Karnataka government, were allegedly caught watching porn inside the assembly on a mobile phone during a discussion on drought-related issues by legislators.
According to the Daily Mail, Savadi had then explained, "The truth is like this... The mobile phone had a video of a rape incident. The victim is murdered by the rapists. Subsequently, the people chase the rapists and catch them. Later, the government awards death sentence to the accused. Patil and I were sympathising with the victim."
Krishna Palemar, another BJP minister in the erstwhile BJP government had allegedly provided the clips to his colleagues to watch. The trio later resigned even as they claimed they had done nothing wrong.