The Legislative Assembly House committee has decided to summon the three former Ministers — who were caught watching porn clips in the Assembly — before it on March 8.
According to sources, a decision to this effect was taken at a meeting of the committee on Thursday. The four-member committee headed by Srishailappa Biradur is learnt to have issued notices to the three former Ministers — Laxman Savadi, C.C. Patil and Krishna Palemar — asking them to appear before it on March 8.
The committee is learnt to have examined the written responses of all the three former Ministers on Thursday. All the three of them reportedly claimed that they were innocent. Mr. Palemar is said to have claimed that the mobile on which the porn clips were watched did not belong to him. Similarly, Mr. Patil has claimed that he did not watch the porn video, but only tried to switch it off. Mr. Savadi has maintained that his act of watching the porn clip was not a deliberate one.
The committee also grilled a journalist belonging to a private Kannada TV channel on Thursday. It is learnt to have posed the same set of questions which it had asked other TV journalists at its meeting on Wednesday. However, one new question that was asked on Thursday was that whether the journalist and his organisation were aware of the relevant provisions of the Cable TV Act which barred them from telecasting porn content.
Emerging out of the meeting, Mr. Biradur said the committee would submit its report to Speaker K.G. Bopaiah either on March 19 or 20 before the commencement of the Budget session. This would mean that the committee's deadline would have to be extended as originally it was scheduled to submit its report by March 13.
The committee's members are S. R. Vishwanath, Suresh Gowda and Nehru Olekar.
