A senior spokesman of India’s ruling Congress party resigned on Monday after a controversial tape allegedly featuring him having sex was leaked on the Internet. Lawmaker Abhishek Manu Singhvi said in a statement he was also quitting as head of a parliamentary committee on law and justice.
India’s parliament has been gridlocked by a series of graft scandals embroiling the Congress-led government, and the video allegedly showed Singhvi having sex with a female colleague in his legal chambers.
Singhvi, 53, said he had been forced to step down because of the controversy surrounding the “distorted CD” row, which he dismissed as “pure imagination, wishful thinking and sensationalism”. “I have done this only to prevent even the slightest possible parliamentary disruption regarding the purported CDs being circulated about me,” he said. The Delhi High Court earlier this month stopped TV channels from broadcasting the contents of the video, which had been circulated by Singhvi’s former driver who reportedly nursed a grudge against the politician.