Arrested diplomat a dalit women's rights champion - Times of India

WASHINGTON: The Indian diplomat who is at the center of a flaming row between New Delhi and Washington in a case involving alleged visa fraud relating to a housekeeper also happens to be a dalit women's rights champion.

Devyani Khobragade, the deputy consul-general of the Indian mission in New York, spoke in April this year on ''Women's Rights and the Influence of De mographics in India'' at the Australian Consulate in Manhattan. ''The continued entrenchment of women's rights through affirmative action, such as reservations for women in parliament, a holistic approach to education and gender sensitisation were also discussed by Dr Khobragade and the round-table participants,'' according to the Australian consulate, which identified her as a ''woman of the Dalit caste.''

On the social media though, there was little sympathy for the diplomat, with some readers pointing to her involvement in the Adarsh housing issue, where she is reportedly a member. Her father Uttam Khobragade, is a retired Maharashtra government bureaucrat and former head of Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA).

Others recalled several notorious cases of Indian families mistreating their domestic help and using them as slave labor, although the U.S charges against Khobragade mainly pertained to fraud and misrepresentation, not abuse.

< p>In one of the most egregious cases the wife-husband team of Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani, NRIs who owned a multi-million dollar perfume business in New York, were sentenced in 2007 to 11 and 3 years respectively for abusing their Indonesian housekeepers. Their callousness and brutality provoked such revulsion that New York tabloids dubbed Varsha Sabhnani as ''Cruella De Evil.'' The couple was also ordered to pay restitution of more than a million dollars to the women they enslaved.

While that episode brought to light what the judge in that case called modern day slave labor practice, Bharara has signaled that the U.S will not tolerate exploitation of foreign workers even by diplomats. ''Foreign nationals brought to the United States to serve as domestic workers are entitled to the same protections against exploitation as those afforded to United States citizens. The false statements and fraud alleged to have occurred here were designed to circumvent those protections so that a visa would issue for a domestic worker who was promised far less than a fair wage. This type of fraud on the United States and exploitation of an individual will not be tolerated,'' he said in a statement.

This is the third case involving a senior official of the New York Indian Consulate in labor disputes in the past three years. In June 2011, a former housekeeper had sued India's then consul general in New York Prabhu Dayal accusing him of intimidating her into a year of forced labor. In February 2012, a New York City Magistrate Judge ordered that Neena Malhotra, a diplomat at the Consulate to pay nearly $1.5 million for forcing an under-aged Indian girl, Shanti Gurung, to work without pay and meting out ''barbaric treatment'' to her.

A host of social and cultural factors seem to be at play in all these situations. Former Indian officials who have served abroad explained that Indian bureaucrats are typically used to services of underpaid (modesty pai d) domestic help who room and board with them on their foreign postings. Because the employers take care of all their other needs, including housing, food, medical treatment, and trips back home, their commitment to mandated local wage in western countries is only of a ''technical nature.''

In this case, one official explained, the trade-off was between paying the domestic help the minimum wage of $ 9.75 an hour and having her live separately (difficult in Manhattan on that wage) or subsiding a live-in arrangement with lower wages, while meeting the "technical requirement" of $ 9.75 an hour.

Another official suggested that domestic help who came from India had also wised up to local laws and some of them reneged on arrangements they had agreed to in India to later seek restitution and permanent residency in the U.S. One remedy, said Shakti Sinha, a former Indian official who did a stint with the World Bank-IMF, was to not allow Indian diplomats to take help abroa d.

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