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.
