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India ordered the United States on Friday to withdraw one of its diplomats from New Delhi, as the Indian consul at the center of the dispute between the two countries flew home after being indicted in New York for visa fraud. Devyani Khobragade, 39, who was India's deputy consul-general in New York, was arrested on December 12 and indicted on Thursday before being effectively expelled from the country. Her arrest set off a furor in India amid disclosures that she was handcuffed and strip-searched. She was flying to India on Friday and expected to arrive later in the evening. The...

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...

The crisis surrounding the case of the Indian consular official whose arrest last month sent U.S.-India relations into a tailspin was at least temporarily cooled late Monday when the diplomat agreed to waive a Jan. 13 deadline to indict her. In a request to federal court in New York, the attorney for Devyani Khobragade, charged last month with submitting fraudulent visa documents for her Indian maid, said that “significant communications . . . between the prosecution and the defense and amongst other government officials” could be undermined if the indictment threshold is crossed.

“The U.S. is playing games with India. But America must understand that the world has changed, times have changed and India has changed.” Those were tough words from India’s Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath, but they fell on deaf ears in Washington. At issue is the case of India’s deputy consul general in New York, Devyani Khobragade, who was arrested and handcuffed by U.S. marshals as she dropped off her daughter at school on the morning of Dec. 12. Later, the 39-year old career diplomat was locked up, stripped naked and subjected to a search of her body cavities in...

India's unusual tough stand on the arrest of its diplomat Devyani Khobragade has forced the US to initiate an "inter-agency review" to look into the lapses that happened in the high-profile case that triggered an uproar in India and strained bilateral ties. The US departments involved in the review include the National Security Council of the White House, the State Department and the Justice Department. "An inter-agency review is going on right now to look into the lapses that happened in the case," sources.In a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that there was a "judgemental error" in handling this case,...