This Article is From Oct 15, 2014

Has The Government Forgotten Devyani Khobragade?

(Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)

Have we forgotten Khobragade?

Reports of the Prime Minister's visit to the US were conspicuously silent on whether he raised the issue of the still-pending charges against Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade in the United States, but all indications are that it did not feature in his talking points. It would be a disgrace if New Delhi developed amnesia on the entire affair.

Months after US authorities arrested India's Deputy Consul-General in New York outside her children's school and charged her with paying her Indian domestic worker a salary below the US minimum wage, relations between the two countries, which for some years had featured great amity, remained tense. The UPA government reacted with fury to the mistreatment of an official enjoying diplomatic immunity, and public indignation over the strip-search and "cavity search" of Khobragade, who was detained with common criminals before being released on bail, has been widespread and near-unanimous.

Even our mild-mannered then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the US' conduct "deplorable"; National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon called the US action "despicable" and "barbaric"' and Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid refused to take a conciliatory phone call from Secretary of State John Kerry.

Emotions have run high in India's Parliament and television talk-shows. In writing to her diplomatic colleagues after her arrest, Khobragade, who has denied all of the charges, mentioned that she "broke down many times as the indignities of repeated handcuffing, stripping and cavity searches, swabbing, holdup with common criminals and drug addicts were all being imposed upon me."

A former Indian Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha, publicly called for retaliation against gay American diplomats in India, whose sexual orientation and domestic arrangements are now illegal after a recent Supreme Court ruling. The government has not taken him seriously, but that such a suggestion could be made is a measure of how inflamed passions have become.

Some retaliation has occurred. The initial American excuse (that foreign consuls in the US enjoy a lower level of immunity than other diplomats) led New Delhi to wake up to the very different situation that prevails in India, where US consular officials enjoy a number of privileges unavailable to their Indian counterparts in the US. These privileges - including full-fledged diplomatic ID cards, access to the restricted customs areas of airports, tax-free shipments of items for personal consumption and no questions asked about the terms of their employment of local domestic staff - have swiftly been withdrawn. The cardinal principal of diplomatic relations is reciprocity, and India realized it had been naive in extending courtesies to the U.S. that it was not receiving in return.

In addition, bollards and barriers that had unilaterally been placed by the US Embassy on the street in front of its complex in New Delhi, and which blocked free circulation on a public road, have been removed by the Delhi Police. India had tolerated the barriers in a spirit of friendship, but when it realized the same spirit was not being extended to it, it has reviewed its approach. The Government has, however, reiterated its commitment to the security of US Embassy premises, outside which Indian police pickets have even been reinforced.

Tempers remained inflamed, with US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell, in a New Year's message to Indians, ruefully acknowledging that ties have been "jolted by very different reactions to issues involving one of your consular officers and her domestic worker." Secretary of State John Kerry also expressed "regret" over the incident. But Indians were bewildered that the US State Department would so willfully jeopardize a relationship that Washington had been describing as "strategic", over a practice routinely followed by foreign diplomats for decades.

Most developing country diplomats take domestic staff with them on overseas assignments, paying them a good salary by their national standards, plus a cost differential for working aboard, and perquisites including (in Khobragade's case) a fully-furnished room in a pricey Manhattan apartment, a free television set, a mobile phone, medical insurance and tickets home. The cash part of the salary may be low by US standards - Khobragade herself, as a mid-ranking Indian diplomat, earns less than the US considers a fair wage for her maid - but with the other benefits, the package is attractive for a domestic helper.

More to the point, Khobragade did not find her maid in the American labor market and "exploit" her - she brought her from India to help her in her representational duties, on an official passport, with a US visa given for the purpose. In almost no other country are the local labour laws of the host country applied in such a manner to a foreign diplomat's personal staff.

Privately, American diplomats express frustration at their helplessness in the face of theatrical grandstanding by the ambitious New York prosecutor Preet Bharara, an Indian-American who has been seeking political legitimacy with a series of high-profile prosecutions of Indians in America. For once, however, the zealous American law-enforcer seems to have slipped up on his homework, since Khobragade was arrested at a time when she enjoyed full diplomatic (and not just consular) immunity as an adviser to India's UN mission during the General Assembly. The State Department's handling of the matter - which included giving a green light for Khobragade's arrest - has been, to say the least, inept.

It was only when a court ruled that Khobragade enjoyed full diplomatic immunity at the time of her arrest that she was released and flown out of the country. The authorities promptly slapped fresh charges on her, which now make it impossible for her to visit the US without facing arrest on landing. Surprisingly, despite all the bonhomie attendant upon new Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington in September 2014, the US has shown no signs of moving to drop the charges to defuse the crisis. (Ironically, Khobragade's husband and children are American citizens; she is in effect barred from visiting them in their own country.)

To make matters worse, an air of conspiracy surrounds the spiriting out of India, just before the arrest, of the maid's family on US "trafficking" visas. The suggestion that an Indian diplomat in a wage dispute with her maid is by implication guilty of human trafficking understandably riles Indian diplomats, as does Khobragade being treated in detention like a drug-runner. The American habit of imposing its worldview self-righteously on others is deeply unwelcome. To most Indians, you can't try to dress up common discourtesy as moral virtue.

Indian-American relations have been riding high as a celebration of shared democracy, common concerns about China, increasing trade and investment, and an absence of geopolitical conflict. The Khobragade affair suggests, however, that all this is not enough: to sustain a strategic partnership, what you need above all is mutual respect.

India had handled American diplomats with a generosity of spirit that it felt the bilateral relationship deserved. Now, with the same spirit shown to be lacking from the other side, the friendship had suffered. Can we afford to just drop the whole matter, leaving an Indian diplomat with criminal charges pending against her in a foreign court?

Until the US develops and displays a regard for the sensitivities, pride and honour of other peoples and cultures, it will continue to be resented around the world. And until the Indian Government insists on standing up for those who serve it around the world, we should drop all talk of a robust foreign policy, let alone of aspiring to become a superpower.

Superpowers don't allow other countries to put their diplomats in the dock, and they certainly don't leave their faithful servants in the lurch.

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