False pride

Now that the visa fraud case against Devyani Khobragade has been dismissed by a US court, the issues involved can be discussed without national pride clouding our thinking. To begin with, the assertion of her father that the court dismissed the case because the US authorities framed her in a false case is one more attempt to try to misrepresent facts. The US federal judge dismissed the case because Khobragade had been granted full diplomatic immunity by the US State Department on her being transferred to a UN post at the time she was indicted of visa fraud, not because she was innocent. The fact remains that she lied while applying for a visa for maid Sangeeta Richard when she said Richard will be paid $4,500 a month. Khobragade subsequently made Richard sign a contract that said she will be paid a much lower amount for services during her stay in the US. The US immigration authorities were not told about this contract because it violated US labor laws since the amount involved worked out to a little over $3 an hour, not the mandatory $9.75.
Khobragade and her family should be thankful to the government of India for bailing her out of trouble and jail time at the cost of relations between the two countries. Now that she is home and safe, New Delhi should make sure no one in future is allowed to take shelter behind diplomatic immunity while willfully violating laws of the countries they are posted in.
The way Indian media whipped the country into a frenzy on her arrest in December last year and their subsequent attempt at vilifying Richard clearly showed who they thought was guilty — Richard. How dare she report her mistress to the authorities? The ingrate. Khobragade’s strip search by the US Marshal Service raised a more intense storm in the media for a sustained period than the ones that erupt after a Dalit woman is stripped and beaten in public in some corner of India every six months. On the other hand, the media have not followed up on the case of torture and killing of a maid by the wife of a member of India’s Parliament that was reported late last year.
This goes to show that we in India are used to law being applied to people of different classes differently. That’s why we are outraged when we see one of our elites being treated as a criminal outside our national borders for committing a crime.
No wonder India leads the Walk Free Foundation’s Global Slavery Index for 2013 in the number of modern day slaves.

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