Political Washington gasped in disbelief as Indiana Congressman Dan Burton, who is also a rabid India-baiter, came forward to make this stunning admission. Burton, a favourite son of the Republican Right and the Christian Coalition, has been gunning for Clinton on Capitol Hill and recently called him a ``scumbag'' following stories of the presidential peccadilloes.

As it turned out, Burton, who is lavishly funded by Khalistani and Kashmiri separatists, was no saint either.

Although the Congressman himself provided no details, the Indianapolis Star and News reported this week that Burton had the extramarital relationship with a woman and fathered a child in the early 1980s, when he was a member of the Indiana Senate and the woman worked for a state agency.

``Therewas a relationship many years ago from which a child was born. I am the father. With my wife's knowledge, I have fulfilled my responsibilities as the father,'' Burton said in a statement Friday confirming the stories of an extramarital affair that had been swirling in the political circuit all week long.

The immediate provocation for Burton going public with his story were reports that Vanity Fair magazine was going to be publishing an investigative article about his affair. A freelancer writing for VF had spent weeks in Burton's constituency interviewing some 200 of Burton's friends and acquaintances and the word got back to the lawmaker.

Burton, who disclosed that he had a troubled marriage and had separated from his wife three or four times, drew a line on how much he was going to say about the affair.

``I'm not going to talk any more about my personal life. I've hurt some people that I love very much. Enough is enough,'' he said.

The Indiana Congressman said he was making the disclosure to endharassment of the child's mother and others by the media.

A fiercely pro-family lawmaker, Burton said he had been paying child support to the mother, who is married and living at an undisclosed location in central Indiana. Barbara, his wife of 38 years, was aware of the situation, he said.

Burton also sought to link the media investigation into his private life to his role in investigating the 1996 campaign fund-raising abuses by Clinton's reelection committee and the Democratic National Committee.

The Congressman also sought to differentiate between his affair and the President's behaviour saying he had never perjured himself or obstructed justice. ``I have been as straight as an arrow in my public duty. But this is private,'' he said in his statement.

Burton, who is up for re-election from a Indianapolis Congressional District this November, has won the seat in eight terms. He usually polls around 70 per cent of the votes and is thought to be unbeatable in a conservative, almost completely whiteconstituency. In the November face-off, his Democratic opponent is a former convicted felon who edged out Nat Nagarajan, an Indian-American aspirant, for the party ticket.