“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
—-President George Washington
The arrest of Devyani Khobragade, the deputy consul general for India in New York over an alleged accusation of visa fraud of her domestic help has sparked serious diplomatic conflicts between the United States and India, which continue regardless of Secretary of State John Kerry’s apologies to India. The accusation is that the domestic help, an employee of the Government of India, has been receiving wages of a little over $3 an hour, the less than the legal minimum wage in the state of New York.
There are two principal facets to this case which in recent days has received much attention globally. Firstly, there has been a spotlight over how the middle class and well to do people in India treat their domestic help and secondly, over how the law enforcement in the United States has treated Ms. Khobragade, who was handcuffed, strip searched and even cavity searched before being placed in a detention cell with other female prisoners by the US Marshals who arrested her.
This case certainly opens up a whole host of questions particularly of a moral nature. One such question relates to why would India or anyone appalled by such harsh measures taken by the United States law enforcement agencies not merely consider the rights and well being of a poor and helpless maid in defense of a well to do diplomat? There is no denying that this is an extremely valid point. However, another very valid point cannot and must not be overlooked and ignored. That is the utter brutality and harshness demonstrated by the US law enforcement, not forgetting that India and the United States are two democracies which share a friendly and bilateral relationship. To many Indians and people in general who fail to comprehend such harsh measures carried out by the American law enforcement entities, this is an incident which has taken them completely by surprise. It is quite incomprehensible why there has been such a needless and hostile act by a friendly partner-country which has caught many off-guard, apparently including the White House and the State Department.
So, it would be fair to see the issue from the opposite perspective: how would the United States react if one of its citizens, not to mention a diplomat, were treated in the same manner in a foreign country? Would there not be severe criticism and a literal uproar regarding the rights of the US citizen and how he or she had been mistreated and that too by a friendly nation?
In August of 2013, an American diplomat in Kenya killed one person and injured eight others in a road accident. The United State’s response was to fly the diplomat and his family out of Kenya the very next day citing his diplomatic immunity as protection from prosecution.
To focus on diplomatic immunity is one issue. That is not to be said that those not covered by diplomatic immunity should be treated with utter disrespect even before being convicted, at a stage where the accusation still remains an alleged one. Furthermore, this raises some serious questions as to what exactly is the necessity to treat alleged perpetrators with such little human dignity and respect?
This incident is clearly reminiscent of the arrest of the ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss Kahn, who was arrested in New York in 2011 over the alleged rape of a hotel maid. That incident had sparked a literal uproar in France about how in the United States, arrests are freely mediatized and how the alleged perpetrators are paraded in front of the cameras in the infamous “perp walk.”
The question is whether in the United States, the law enforcement agencies should be exercising their duties in such irresponsible manners which strip a person of all dignity before even being convicted of any crime? Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? Can the policing not function efficiently without the media, the hype and theatrics? Would discretion really be such a bad thing?
