An infamous foreign policy decision that will set the tone for future Indo-US ties.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: In the end – at least we think this is the end, as events between Wednesday night and Thursday evening have unfolded here and in Washington, DC at lightning speed, leaving everybody blindsided and the government in India is just waking up from slumber Friday morning, so who knows what else could transpire, transmogrify – there are no winners in a sad and dubious case that will go down in history as one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the United States: waging a surreptitious judicial, diplomatic war against India that was never meant to go to court, never had an end resolution: the mystery of the Devyani Khobragade case.
There are plenty of losers though.
The case has changed the course of life for everybody involved, is likely to set the tone for Indo-US relations for years to come, if not serve as a permanent strain marker, a cordial setter: Devyani Khobragade, Preet Bharara, Sangeeta Richard, the Indian government and the US government – all have lost to a certain degree.
The worst loser is Khobragade, who has been ordered, requested, asked – terms used by major news sources Thursday who dropped the relay baton trying to break the news, tripping badly like calling prematurely on an election night – and still nobody is sure what has really happened – to leave the country.
According to different people, and news sources, she has already left the country, is about to leave the country Thursday night, or will leave the country. Bharara set the ball rolling on the issue by saying on Wednesday she left the country. Khobragade’s lawyer then compounded matters by saying Thursday she has not left the country but is with her family in New York, but yet another news source had him saying she is leaving Thursday night for India.
In perhaps a defiant and proud move, to get her dignity back from a situation which was not of her own making, criminally indicted, but helpless to defend it, to tell the world her side of the story, has left her devastated – Khobragade stated that she will go to court on Monday morning – which was the original plan according to the ruling by a court on Wednesday till a Grand Jury appeared like an apparition and indicted her – show the judge her diplomatic immunity papers that the State Department signed off on Wednesday and then leave the country, head held as high as she could.
For Khobragade, 39, with two American citizen daughters, who are three and seven years old, going to school in New York, and an American husband, a professor of philosophy who teaches in Philadelphia, this is a real mid-life crisis. She cannot come back to the US, so it means uprooting her family to either India or to have them where her next job takes her. Her career has become her noose.
For Bharara, termed the Sheriff of Wall Street, the crusader against white and blue collar crime, the vanquisher of insider trading, it’s a bitter end to a story which he must have felt it in his bones all along, like the great prosecutor he is, getting only a face-saving indictment to a crime, which was never going to get prosecuted, the criminal jailed.
So what was the point of taking on the case, investigating it for months, getting the arrest warrant out for Khobragade, relocating three family members of Sangeeta Richard, the accuser, from India to the US, all at hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax payer money. Why? It’s a question he can answer easily, to put down crime. But in the end, it seems the end result, the only result that materialized, was to get victims of human trafficking visas, T visas, to Richard’s husband and two children, who can now get political asylum in the US.
For Richard, unlike Khobragade, her immediate family is with her, and whatever happens next, she is not going to be separated from her them, won’t be asked to leave the country, is likely to get permanent residency. What she has lost, along with her husband and two children, is perhaps the opportunity to ever go back to India. How hard is that? Maybe she can ask an illegal immigrant in the US who has been here for 20 years and yearns to see family members back in his or her home country. She also lost the chance of a civil suit against Khobragade: the usual method of punishment for such cases, the most effective way, the right way civil courts work in this country, to award punitive damages. She became a pawn of the US government in a high stakes game, and will have that brand stamped on her and her family for the rest of her life.
For all the news that emanated with the Secretary of State John Kerry and the Indian Ambassador to the US Nancy Powell saying that they regretted the arrest of Khobragade, it was the Indian government that should have said sorry, that they regretted the transgression of Khobragade, that next time around it won’t happen, and they would sit down with the US to resolve the matter in a diplomatic manner, settle the matter of how much Indian maids should make working for Embassy or Consul personnel in the US. Instead, they went on the offensive, as the US watched in consternation, with the emotionally charged attacks translating to threats to cutting off privileges, making the personal life of American diplomats and the families miserable.
For the US government, this was a multiple prism learning course: they got exposed to the world once again as to how much their left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, an argument which has been hyped up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks more than 12 years ago, with several agencies not coordinating effectively at the Federal level. It seemed the State Department and the Justice Department were like separate entities of an end game nobody knew, with a mysterious master puppeteer pulling the strings.
It’s one thing for diplomatic immunity to be given to Khobragade to end the impasse, for her to leave the country, despise the US, but quite another as to why the whole thing started in the first place, to let it escalate: to proceed with wrong visa documents to her maid despite an interview at the American Embassy in New Delhi, for the State Department to sign off on arrest warrant knowing that Khobragade has diplomatic immunity, to have her arrested by the US Marshals, to have her strip searched, cavity searched, jailed, to take matters to an extent to turn a trusted ally into an enemy, to let down a brilliant prosecutor, Bharara, nominated by President Obama.
People play games to win. This one was doomed to be lost, right from the beginning.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar).
To contact the author, email to sujeetrajan@americanbazaaronline.com