NEW DELHI - India scaled back security outside the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and revoked transit privileges for American diplomats as a row deepened over the arrest and strip-search of a consular official in New York.
The Indian official, Devyani Khobragade, 39, who was arrested last Thursday, wrote in an email to colleagues that she was subjected to a cavity search during detention. India retaliated by removing concrete security barricades outside the consular section of the embassy in the nation’s capital, canceling airport passes for U.S. diplomats and freezing import requests, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid said Wednesday.
Mounting tensions threaten to damage what has otherwise been a decade of collaboration between the world’s two biggest democracies as they deepen trade and defense ties and strengthen cooperation to fight terrorism. During his visit in November 2010, President Barack Obama called the relationship with India, a Cold War ally of the Soviet Union, “one of the defining and indispensable partnerships of the 21st century.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “expressed his regret” in a phone call to Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon on Wednesday, “as well as his concern that we not allow this unfortunate public issue to hurt our close and vital relationship with India,” the State Department said in an emailed statement.
Kerry stopped short of an apology and said he “understands very deeply the importance of enforcing our laws and protecting victims, and, like all officials in positions of responsibility inside the U.S. government, expects that laws will be followed by everyone here in our country.”
Khobragade, who worked in India’s consulate general in New York, was arrested by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service around 9:30 a.m. on Thursday in front of her daughter’s school on West 97th Street in Manhattan, her lawyer Daniel Arshack, said. She was held by U.S. Marshals in the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where she was strip-searched. She was presented before a U.S. magistrate judge and released later the same day.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Khobragade’s treatment “deplorable.”
A federal prosecutor on Wednesday defended the arrest and strip-search, saying Khobragade was treated very well, even given coffee and offered food while detained.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who made the highly unusual move of issuing a lengthy statement addressing the arrest and issues not in a criminal complaint, said Khobragade was afforded courtesies most Americans wouldn’t get - such as being allowed to make phone calls for two hours to arrange child care and sort out personal matters - after she was arrested.
Bharara said Khobragade, who has pleaded innocent, wasn’t handcuffed, restrained or arrested in front of her children. And he said that while she was “fully searched” in private by a female deputy marshal, the move was a standard safety practice all defendants undergo.
Khobragade has been transferred to India’s mission to the United Nations, her lawyer and a former colleague said Wednesday. It’s unclear how such a move might affect her immunity from prosecution, and a U.N. spokesman said it hadn’t received a necessary transfer request from her Wednesday evening.
Khobragade was being blackmailed by her housekeeper, who was seeking money and U.S. legal residency, Foreign Minister Khurshid said in the upper house of India’s Parliament Wednesday. Khobragade’s pleas for help to the New York Police Department were never taken seriously, he said.
“Our sense as a nation, as a people and as human beings is that what has happened is totally and entirely unacceptable,” Khurshid said. “I will bring her back and restore her dignity. I will do it and show you all.”
U.S. prosecutors said Khobragade submitted a false visa application for an employee who was to work as her housekeeper and baby sitter, and court records show she was charged with one count each of visa fraud and making false statements.
Khobragade, whose titles include diplomat for women’s affairs, declared on the visa application that she was paying a salary of $9.75 an hour - above minimum wage as required by law, according to a statement from the office of Bharara. Instead, Khobragade and the Indian woman agreed she would work for just $3.31 an hour, according to a Department of Justice statement.
“One wonders whether any government would not take action regarding false documents being submitted to it in order to bring immigrants into the country,” Bharara said in the statement. “And one wonders why there is so much outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian national accused of perpetrating these acts, but precious little outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian victim and her spouse?”
The visa fraud charge against Khobragade carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if she’s convicted, according to Bharara’s office. The maximum for the false statements charge is five years. Information for this article was contributed by Kartikay Mehrotra, Andrew MacAskill and Bob Van Voris of Bloomberg News and by Cara Anna and Nirmala George of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 12/19/2013