Posted on 01/07/2014 9:09:39 AM PST by mojito
Nearly a month after American authorities arrested India’s deputy consul general in New York, Devyani Khobragade, outside her children’s school and charged her with paying her Indian domestic worker a salary below the minimum wage, bilateral relations remain tense. India’s government has reacted with fury to the mistreatment of an official enjoying diplomatic immunity, and public indignation has been widespread and nearly unanimous. So, has an era of steadily improving ties between the two countries come to an end?
Judging from Indian leaders’ statements, it would certainly seem so. India’s mild-mannered Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that Khobragade’s treatment was “deplorable.” National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon called her arrest “despicable” and “barbaric,” and Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid refused to take a conciliatory phone call from US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Emotions have run high in India’s Parliament and on television talk shows as well. Writing to her diplomatic colleagues after her arrest, Khobragade, who has denied the charges against her, noted that she “broke down many times,” owing to “the indignities of repeated handcuffing, stripping, and cavity searches, swabbing,” and to being held “with common criminals and drug addicts.” A former Indian foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, has 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 his suggestion indicates how inflamed passions have become.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
Teach us a lesson and take back all your crap quality software “engineers” so Americans can have the jobs.
If grown-ups were in charge at the State and Justice Departments, the diplomat and her maid would have been quietly asked to leave the country if there had been serious irregularities, and that would have been that. Never forget that 0bama was best boyhood buddies with Pakistanis. I'm thinking Lord Zero is not letting a crisis go to waste here, and deliberately letting this situation go on and on, and so cause maximum damage to US-India relations.
Ahhhhhhhgggg.
Good grief, man!
What’d you have to go and do THAT for?
The animals who arrested and then digitally raped this woman guywith their fingers should be shot and their handlers imprisoned.
The Indians just found out the USA is now a police state.
I’ve wondered about this story on at least two related fronts:
1. Is it typical to arrest, and to jail pretrial (rather than to release on O.R. or a small bond), ANYone suspected of underpaying employees? That sounds like a civil and/or regulatory matter, not a criminal one, at least not unless the alleged abuses are far more severe than underpayment. (This question is without regard to the foreign/ diplomatic status of the defendant.)
2. I thought any credentialed diplomat was diplomatically immune from prosecution, including arrest, period. All the host nation can do (I thought, apparently incorrectly?) is to declare the diplomat Persona Non Grata and give him/her 72 hours or so to GTFO.
The only explaination that makes sense.
No, it is because Indian culture sucks and those of us lucky enough to live in America and away from that culture can’t stand it :)
Hello hath no fury if you try to get between a Brahmin Princess and her royal privileges.
And the State Department is saying that the woman wasn't high-ranking enough to have diplomatic immunity, even though India grants immunity to US diplomats of the same rank.
Yours and thousands more.....the person who immediately came to mind when readomg the words, The Ugly American, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz described as an American Politician....she is anything but honorable or patriotic, politicians should be at least part of those attributes, WassermanSchultz fails miserably in fact she gives new meaning to Ugly American ...
Hmmm, he could be advancing a visit/humiliation by Obama hisseff. Such as bumbling and stumbling through his toasts, spilling his drink on the host Head of State, gifting him/her with a Motown DVD and/or a collection of Barky's Best Teleprompted Speeches, and then maybe bowing to the Pakistani ambassador. Like that, maybe.
“Hello hath no fury if you try to get between a Brahmin Princess and her royal privileges. “
Actually she is from the untouchable(lowest) caste, but let’s not get the facts in the way of the narrative.
So Dalits are now diplomats?
Yes there are Dalits who are diplomats. The Indian constitution was written by one such dalit. The Indian PM is not even a brahmin, but a Sikh. They've even had a christian defense minister a few years ago, the current one is atheist. India has also had a muslim president... etc etc etc The political landscape in India is actually very very diverse.
“So Dalits are now diplomats?”
A dalit became president in 1997. And the largest Indian State is ruled by dalits. Diplomats are small potatoes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_political_positions_in_India#Scheduled_Castes_and_tribes
Now, the Indians who are Americanized are quite a different matter. I know many who have achieved greatly…mostly by abandoning such caste consciousness and embracing small-d democracy. I also have had some close encounters with Brahmin princesses and don not care to repeat the experience.
I’m sorry to hear about your traumatic experience. Regardless, the princess turned out to be a dalit, not a brahmin.
It did.
The federal prosecutor and the State Department mucked up royally.
As I read it, India is due one of Obumma's bow & scrapes, plus an apology.
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