The Diplomat and Her Housekeeper
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
Only two weeks ago, she was an obscure midlevel diplomat at India’s New York consulate, but the name Devyani Khobragade has now become familiar worldwide. Khobragade, 39, India’s deputy consul general, was arrested on December 11 in New York for submitting false documents to the US State Department in order to obtain a work visa to bring her maid servant, Sangeeta Richards, to the USA. While in her service, the housekeeper was allegedly made to work fourteen-hour days and paid far less than the minimum wages required by law in New York. Ms. Khobragade could face a ten-year sentence, if convicted.
News that Khobragade was stripped and body searched by female marshals and briefly incarcerated in a cell with drug addicts provoked a firestorm in India, as both the ruling and the opposition party members expressed outrage at the treatment of their diplomat and perceived affront to their national honor. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, normally a cool, cerebral person, characterized the arrest as "deplorable." On the streets of Delhi, however, there were mob demonstrations of fury, with obligatory ritual burning of President Obama’s effigy. Some of the privileges accorded to US diplomats were also withdrawn. More ominously, the security barricades around the American embassy, designed to protect it from terrorist attacks were taken down in retaliation for the US action.
India, whose relationship with the US has grown much warmer in recent years demanded that the case against Khobragade be lifted, claiming that she had diplomatic immunity. However, according to the Department of Justice lawyers, her extant position did not confer immunity, as stipulated in the Vienna Convention on Consular relations.
India’s resentment was not assuaged by the expression of regret by Secretary of State, John Kerry, who tends to be too quick to apologize to all and sundry. However, he has no ability to intervene in the ongoing legal proceedings against the Indian diplomat. The Khobragade case has a number of interesting and unusual dimensions. US attorney, Preet Bharara, who brought the case against her, is himself Indian-born, one of the many successful Indians in highly powerful positions in this administration. Uncompromising and punctilious, he has successfully prosecuted members of the mafia, Al Qaeda, and Wall Street tycoons and has never lost a case in court. He has vowed to prosecute the Khobragade case fully, and has denied that she was ever handcuffed. He affirmed that she received all the courtesies accorded in such cases. Bharara is not currently popular in his former homeland, and has become the target of derision from protestors who are calling him “Uncle Tom.”
Unlike the angry reaction in India, prominent Indians in the US have adopted a more deliberate, thoughtful approach, defending the actions of the US law enforcement officers and expressing some sympathy for the plight of the housekeeper who seems to have been forgotten in the fracas. Writing on the Op-ed page of the New York Times, Ananya Bhattacharyya , a Washington-based writer and journalist, noted that “India is party to an exploitative system.” “If caste still ruled”, he speculated, “Ms Khobragade, the diplomat, would not have been considered fit to shake hands with her upper-class colleagues, for she is from a dalit (traditionally considered untouchable) family.”
The case against Khobragade involves complex issues of conflicting cultural and traditional values. In most developing countries, domestic servants have no legal protection, nor are the employers required to pay a minimum wage. Most middle class families in India and Pakistan employ some domestic help, while those higher on the economic ladder may have an army of them, all without any legal protection. Lady Pamela Mountbatten, daughter of the last British Viceroy of India, noted in her recent book Daughter of Empire, that there were five hundred and fifty-five domestic servants to serve the viceroy and his family at the Vice regal lodge at Delhi in 1947. There is no indication they enjoyed any better working conditions or received superior compensations than their counterparts today.
Human Rights watch and other organizations regularly document abuse and mistreatment of temporary workers, especially females, in Middle Eastern countries. Imported mostly from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, they work in conditions of virtual servitude. In an article published in the November 20 edition of the Washington Post, Abigail Hauslohner, the newspaper’s Cairo chief, documented the miserable conditions under which thousands of migrant workers live and work in the richest country on the planet, Qatar. She noted that “all of them complained of abusive, slave-like working conditions” and that “they sleep 10 persons per room in bleak labor camps”. Too fearful to complain openly, they suffer silently.
In tradition-bound India, it is inconceivable that the complaint of a lowly domestic servant against a member of the prestigious Foreign Service would be given so much credence by the society. How, some ask incredulously, could Khobragade afford to pay the housekeeper the wages mandated by law in New York? However, this is precisely the reason why middle income Americans cannot afford to employ full-time domestic servants. Besides wages, the private employers are required to pay social security taxes that afford pension benefits to the workers when they retire or are unable to work.
Of course, not all Americans comply with the law, but if caught are liable to face serious consequence. In 1993, President Clinton’s nomination of Ms Zoe Baird for Attorney General, the first female to be so nominated, had to be withdrawn when it was discovered that she had employed illegal immigrants as domestic help and avoided paying their social security taxes. Barely a month later, another Clinton nomination for a federal judgeship, Kimba Wood, was scuttled for similar reasons. Some women's group had complained at the time that the two candidates being females had drawn greater scrutiny than usual. However, the law worked as intended. Unlike these, there are cases in which US compliance of the laws is in question. For example, details of the transaction remain murky in the case of Raymond Davis , a former CIA contractor in Pakistan who killed two men in Lahore in January 2011, but was freed on payment of 2.4 million dollars to the families of the deceased.
The Indian Government has moved Khobragade to its United Nations Mission in New York where she will enjoy full diplomatic immunity against future prosecutions. She comes from an affluent family. Her father is a former Indian Administrative Service Officer, belonging to the subcast called Mahars, whose members were once limited to performing menial tasks. Khobragade showcases the remarkable success of the program that mandates that 15 percent of all Government jobs shall be reserved for members of the Dalit community. Ms Khobragade recently told an Indian newspaper that “her ambition was to have direct impact on a foreign policy (issue) for underprivileged women.” Maybe, in her future job at the UN mission, she will match her words with her deeds.
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