Avoidable Mess , Khobragade affair.

None of the principal actors have acted sensibly in the Khobragade affair.

Nothing regarding the arrest of Devyani Khobragade, then deputy consul general at India’s New York consulate, and the reaction to it inspires confidence about public affairs in the United States and in India. If the manner in which she was arrested and subjected to various indignities – handcuffing, strip searches, body cavity searches – could have been avoided considering her position and the nature of her alleged “crime”, the reactions to this incident have also been strident, betraying a sense of misplaced nationalism on the part of the Indian political establishment.

Both Khobragade and her domestic help, Sangeeta Richard, who had filed a case against her employer alleging visa fraud and non-payment of the prescribed minimum wages in the US, are Indian citizens. The argument that this practice – visa fraud and false declaration related to wages – is rampant in diplomatic circles and that Khobragade had diplomatic immunity does not hold water. Khobragade’s non-payment of the minimum wage was an issue to be investigated in the event of a complaint filed by her employee in the US and consular officials could indeed be arrested for acts committed outside official functions, according to the Vienna Convention. Her subsequent transfer to India’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations seems a belated acknowledgement of the above fact.
The Indian external affairs ministry should have acknowledged the problem of payment of lower wages than the prescribed minimum in the US, offered to recompense the complainant adequately and sought the US state department’s intervention to avoid unnecessary escalation and arrest of Khobragade. Instead, Khobragade filed a counter-case of theft by Richard in an Indian court rather than pursuing it in the US itself (for the actions were supposedly committed in the US), which only saw the US justice department acting in a seeming hurry to secure justice for Richard. The US state department also refused to acknowledge concerns from the Indian external affairs ministry about the repatriation of Sangeeta Richard and the allegations against her.
As it turned out, the humiliation meted out to the Indian diplomat in the manner she was arrested, and made an example of, swiftly saw the Indian government and the external affairs ministry reacting in indignation. The Indian government ordered a number of measures designed to remove privileges enjoyed by US embassy officials in India, in what seemed to be a case of India suddenly developing a strong spine in its dealing with the all-powerful Americans.
This starkly contrasted with the Indian reaction to other cases of frisking of Indian government officials and citizens in the US in the recent past. Or even to the more serious recent revelations of dragnet espionage by the US National Security Agency of millions of Indian citizens over the internet. India’s response in this case was not just tepid but pretty much dismissive about the seriousness of these revelations. The Indian nonchalance was again very different from the way other similar developing countries responded. A livid Brazil, for example, not only expressed its displeasure with the US in no uncertain terms, it also took steps to mitigate its dependence upon the US for internet communications.
In the past decade, the Indian foreign policy establishment –egged on by governments – has gone out of the way to address US concerns and has taken many steps to seek closer ties with the US. It risked sabotaging its nuanced relationship with countries like Iran by voting against it in a resolution on Iran’s nuclear programme in the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006, which paved the way eventually for sanctions against Iran. It went out of its way to honour the unilateral sanctions imposed on Iran by the US over and above what the United Nations had come up with. This had hurt Indian trade with Iran, affecting its oil supplies. Clearly, something substantive is absent in the way the Indian establishment functions. Why does the Indian foreign policy establishment express indignation and articulate its interests only when one of its own diplomatic officials is ill-treated, this even in a case where the complainant – another Indian citizen – has a legitimate grievance? Why does it not stand up to the superpower over other, more substantive issues?
The Indian political parties’ reaction to this issue has been even more outlandish, bordering on jingoism. The Bharatiya Janata Party sought the invocation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to arrest queer US diplomatic officials. The Bahujan Samaj Party only raised its annoyance because the official is from the dalit community, while the Samajwadi Party offered Khobragade its party ticket to contest the Lok Sabha elections. None of these parties (including the Congress) has much to say or articulate about independent foreign policy or how the Indian external affairs ministry must seek to protect Indian interests from being swayed by US concerns in any substantive sense. In a way, the Khobragade affair (she was released on bail hours later upon the Indian government paying a $250,000 bail bond) only betrays the complacency of India’s external affairs ministry in the matter of Indo-US relations and the immature and somewhat elitist mindset of the Indian political class. It is this mindset and behaviour that the US has exploited well enough for serving its specific interests and to get its way when it comes to its preferences in matters related to India’s foreign policy.