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Surprised by the frontal assault launched by India, the US State Department today hemmed and hawed at the circumstances in which Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade was arrested, strip searched and questioned.
The State Department spokesperson tried to pass the buck to the US Marshal (who, according to the State Department is the 'intake authority') and tried to backtrack on whether Khobragade really needed to have been treated the way she was. The State Department went on about how India and the US are strategic allies and was generally defensive about the disrespect to Khobragade.
While not exactly saying they were sorry, the State Department basically said sorry.
The new point to come out of the briefing was that the Indian government was warned in September that Khobragade may be involved in visa fraud. The question is: what did our government do about this warning? Was there a warning at all? Did the government conduct its own investigation? Did it inform US Authorities that Khobragade's housekeeper had decamped with papers, money, passport and was at large, somewhere in the US?
So the conclusion from this is inescapable that the Indian Foreign Office is telling us only half the facts: that it wasn't as if Khobragade was arrested out of the blue when she was dropping her children to school, it was that the Indian government got a fair warning in September 2013 that something was afoot.
So if the Indian government had acted on time, maybe this whole sorry episode might not have happened.
Another matter: the State Department should really ask its spokespersons to read the Vienna Convention before coming to brief on such an important matter. The Convention is so clearly drafted that there is no room for ambiguity. Equally clearly drafted is the guidebook issued to law enforcement officers in New York where immunities are clearly explained because this is something they have to come up against all the time, on account of the UN Headquarters located in that area of New York.
Read the edited transcript of the State Department's Deputy spokesperson, Marie Harf's daily briefing, dated 17 December 2013. You can judge for yourself what the US is trying to say about the Khobragade episode.
