Wednesday, December 18, 2013

India Moves to Protect Devyani Khobragade From US Government

Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade, who was arrested in the US, has been transferred to the permanent mission at United Nations, which entitles her to full diplomatic immunity, The Times of India reports.

Devyani Khobragade
In Parliament, external affairs minister Salman Khurshid condemned the US action and said he will not return to the House if he fails in his responsibility to bring back Khobragade.

He said there was a "conspiracy" in which the 1999-batch IFS officer was "virtually trapped" and maintained that the diplomat is "innocent" and the US action was unwarranted. "It is not illegality that she is accused of, but the illegality she refused to oblige," he said.

Khobragade was taken into custody on a street in New York as she was dropping her daughter to school. She was released on a USD 250,000 bond after pleading not guilty in court.

The arrest has caused an uproar in India.

India announced retaliatory measures against the United States on Wednesday, including revising work conditions of Indians employed in US consulates and a freeze on duty-free alcohol.

Protests have broken out outside US embassy in New Delhi over ill treatment meted out to Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade.

11 comments:

  1. Who will protect Americans from their own government?

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  2. Comment at CBS news article on this case:

    RyanAcres 3 hours ago

    Speaking of low labor wages, does anyone know that Ph.D. students who are granted an F-1 Visa are ALSO NOT paid the minimum wage of $9 per hour and made to work much more than a maid or company professional for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week by tenured American Professors in the United States? Their spouses on F-2 Visa are not even allowed to work or to apply for a work permit. Devyani's maid, on the contrary, did not pay for her house rent (in NYC it's roughly $3,000 for a 2BD apartment), food, clothing, electricity and miscellaneous utility expenses. So if you do the math, you will immediately realize that the maid living in a posh New York apartment without paying for rent, groceries and utilities should actually end up paying a large sum of money to Dr. Devyani instead.

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  3. So we're in a diplomatic war with India because of. . .THE MINIMUM WAGE!

    And while India's National Security Adviser labels her treatment by the U.S. Marshals Service as "despicable and barbaric", the USMS piously states she was subject to the same search procedures as all other USMS arrestees, which speaks for itself.

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    Replies
    1. Chris,
      I dont think that they needed to perform a strip search and cavity search on the lady. She was not accused of a heinous crime.

      Delete
  4. From ZeeNews:

    8:15 pm: Was US govt aware of whereabouts of Khobragade's maid?

    Even though the US government feigned ignorance, it may have been aware about the whereabouts of Sangeeta Richard, the maid of Indian Deputy Consul General in New York Devyani Khobragade who is at the centre of a diplomatic row.

    Indicative of this is that Sangeeta's father-in-law is believed to be working in the US Embassy here.

    Sources said the mother-in-law of the maid was also known to the American government as she had worked with a senior diplomat of the US Embassy here.

    Besides these, Sangeeta's husband Philip, a driver with Mozambique Embassy here, was given visa to travel to the US easily and quickly.

    Indian government wonders whether all the requirements for grant of visa to him were fulfilled, particularly those related to adequate salary and financial deposits in his bank account. - PTI


    More:

    7:10 pm: US committed visa fraud: India

    India today said its Deputy Consul General in New York Devyani Khobragade was trapped in a "conspiracy" and accused US of a fraud by granting a visa to the family of her absconding maid.

    "She is innocent... It is not the illegality that she (Khobragade) is accused of, but the illegality she refused to oblige," External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid told Parliament.

    Khurshid further said Americans facilitated a visa fraud even after being told by India that there was a risk of illegal immigration by Sangeeta and her family.

    6:15 pm: Maid’s family flew to NY on Dec 10

    Devyani Khobragade’s absconding maid Sangeeta Richard's family flew to New York on December 10, just two days before the diplomat's arrest, government sources said.

    Also, India was in touch with the US since June after the official passport of the maid was cancelled and subsequently told about the anti-injunction suit order by an Indian court, they added.

    5:40 pm: India freezes diplomatic perks for US consulates

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  5. Opinion in India is completely against the USG's action on this. Don't be fooled by so-called Indian comments supporting the action on Indian sites. These are almost hundred percent spurious comments by fake persona, intelligence plants or brainwashed commie students. Most Indians are too poor to spend time blogging and commenting and the net is not always up.

    India's English language media is OWNED by the West and tries to steer public opinion on gay rights, female empowerment and such, by the twitterati. Here's the ownership structure.

    Who owns the media in India ?


    There are several major publishing groups in India, the most prominent
    among them being the Times of India Group, the Indian Express Group, the
    Hindustan Times Group, The Hindu group, the Anandabazar Patrika Group, the Eenadu Group, the Malayalam Manorama Group, the Mathrubhumi group, the Sahara group, the Bhaskar group, and the Dainik Jagran group.

    Let us see the ownership of different media agencies.

    NDTV: A very popular TV news media is funded by Gospels of Charity in Spain that supports Communism. Recently it has developed a soft corner towards Pakistan because Pakistan President has allowed only this channel to be aired in Pakistan. Indian CEO Prannoy Roy is co-brother of Prakash Karat, General Secretary of Communist party of India.His wife and Brinda Karat are sisters.

    India Today which used to be the only national weekly which supported BJP is now bought by NDTV!! Since then the tone has changed drastically and turned into Hindu bashing.

    CNN-IBN: This is 100 percent funded by Southern Baptist Church with its
    branches in all over the world with HQ in US. The Church annually allocates
    $800 million for promotion of its channel. Its Indian head is Rajdeep
    Sardesai and his wife Sagarika Ghosh.

    Times group list: Times Of India, Mid-Day, Nav-Bharth Times, Stardust , Femina, Vijaya Times,Vijaya Karnataka, Times now (24- hour news channel) and many more. Times Group is owned by Bennet & Coleman. 'World Christian Council' does 80 percent of the Funding, and an Englishman and an Italian equally share balance 20 percent. The Italian Robertio Mindo is a close relative of Sonia Gandhi.

    Star TV: It is run by an Australian, Robert Murdoch, who is supported by St. Peters Pontificial Church Melbourne.

    Hindustan Times: Owned by Birla Group, but hands have changed since Shobana Bhartiya took over. Presently it is working in Collaboration with Times Group.

    The Hindu: English daily, started over 125 years has been recently taken over by Joshua Society, Berne, Switzerland. N.Ram's wife is a Swiss national.

    Indian Express: Divided into two groups. The Indian Express and new Indian Express (southern edition) .ACTS Christian Ministries have major stake in the Indian Express and latter is still with the Indian counterpart.

    Eeenadu: Still to date controlled by an Indian named Ramoji Rao. Ramoji Rao is connected with film industry and owns a huge studio in Andhra Pradesh.

    Andhra Jyothi: The Muslim party of Hyderabad known as MIM along with a
    Congress Minister has purchased this Telugu daily very recently.

    The Statesman: It is controlled by Communist Party of India. Kairali TV: It
    is controlled by Communist party of India (Marxist)

    Mathrubhoomi: Leaders of Muslim League and Communist leaders have major investment.

    Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle: Is owned by a Saudi Arabian Company with its chief Editor M.J. Akbar.

    The ownership explains the control of media in India by foreigners. The
    result is obvious.

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  6. The solution is obvious: The USG should send the marines to India and take control of the country. The USG can install a friendly dictator (via election, of course) and the US Army can then train the new Indian Army and then the Indians can use what the USG teaches them to kill more Americans. If the USG follows this plan, which already has preven track records in Iraq and Afghanistan, the USG could keep its Army busy for another 30 years.
    Think of all that job creation!

    Jerry Wolfgang approves of this message.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh who cares?
    Diplomats or politicians being stabbed in the back by the state.
    Couldn't happen to nicer people.

    Where are those Indian hypocrites when much harsher treatment happens to non-government functionaries?
    But oh noes... One of their own, a diplomat no less, is being arrested and strip searched. Time for war.

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  8. I am sure that if Laura Bush had had her rectum probed it would be a big problem and people would speak up, far more than if Jane Blow had hers. That's normal, not hypocrisy.
    Plenty of Indians have spoken up about abusive treatment of ordinary people in India and elsewhere.
    But I guess racists like Tony wouldn't know because they don't read anything except what's written by fellow whites in English, right?


    Firstpost World

    Time we returned the insult to US liberally by R Jagannathan Dec 18, 2013

    The despicable treatment of Devyani Khobragade, Indian Deputy Consul general in New York, should be another wake up call for India and talk-circuit liberals....

    We should not take such affronts lying down anymore. In a limited sense, the transgressions of US minimum wages law by Khobragade will draw the usual Indian liberal nonsense: if we are in contravention of their law, we are the guilty party....

    . Our general assumption that the US law enforcers are merely doing their duty is rubbish. If alleged violation of US visa laws by Infosys can be settled with a fine, why couldn't the US have done so for Khobragade? Or is a woman diplomat fair game for US law enforcers?

    Indians are the most gullible goops in the world when it comes to discerning the difference between an honest effort to implement the law and using laws to project power and blackmail other countries. The American government is the most sophisticated legally illegal enterprise in the world when it comes to dealing with people from other countries.....//

    The truth is American agencies have sophisticated ways of using their laws against foreigners to defend their interests. Their laws may oppose torture, so they will use Guantanamo Bay to for torture and waterboarding against prisoners. President Obama vowed to shut it down, but Guantanamo is still around.

    Even if it is shut, they will ask allies in brutal Africa or Thailand to do their dirty work. Americans are forbidden by their own laws to indulge is assassinations abroad, but Obama has converted the CIA into a killing machine. Two years ago, they killed one of their own nationals – Anwar al-Awlaki, for example - because of his alleged terror links (not proven in a court of law). The Americans regularly use drones against civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and South Yemen on the plea that one among them may be a terrorist.

    To have plausible deniability, they even use private surveillance and security agencies as surrogate CIA agents. (Read Mark Mazzetti's eyeopening book, The Way of the Knife, to get a glimpse into this). Their freedom of religion laws will be used against the one country which actually allows everyone to practice and propagate his religion (India), but top allies like Saudi Arabia will get a free pass on this law. America will swear by free markets to lobby for Wal-mart, but will not recognise freedom for labour movement. Is free enterprise only about the movement of capital and not other factors of production?

    The Americans practice sophisticated racism. Thus they will use a Preet Bharara to target Khobragade (or Rajat Gupta or Raj Rajaratnam) so that it looks like Indian-Americans are implementing the law, and hence not racist, but the same laws will not be used to humiliate the Hispanics or Afro-Americans or the Saudis or American icons like the late Steve Jobs or to convict Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton.

    (Read the comments on a Washington Post story on Preet Bharara, where the commenter accuses Bharara of not following up on the alleged misdemeanours of some pillars of the American judicial establishment.)

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  9. The maid came to US with sole intention of staying back and immigrating to US. Coming to US on work visa with internet to stay afterwards or apply for immigration n US is a clear violation of visa regulations. She is supposed to come back to India after her visa expires or the work is terminated. This intention is further strengthened by assertion made my maids mother in law that the amid always wanted to go abroad and work there.

    Khobragade, accompanied by consular officers, speaks with Richard in Midtown Manhattan at a meeting Richard initiated through Access Immigration. In the last face-to-face meeting between the two women before Khobragade's arrest. During the encounter, Khobragade urges Richard to honor her visa requirement and return to India, while Richard demands cash and new immigration documents. The meeting grows so contentious that Access Immigration officials who are present call New York police to escort Richard out of the room. Access Immigration has declined comment other than to say the group is no longer working on Richard's case.

    One would wonder will a person (maid) who has been abused show such a demeanor towards the diplomat so as to be escorted out of the meeting by the cops. It raises serious question about maids accusations. This a straight case of fraud and extortion by the maid in order to game the system to get T visa for herself and her family.

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  10. You will discover a few airfields where foreigners can enter in Vietnam: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang. Prior to foreigners can enter in the nation by way of these types of airfields, they have to get a Vietnam Visa. A new Vietnam carte visa is essential for most foreigners to gain access to enter in and depart Vietnam. People to the nation ought to know the expense of any visa.

    ReplyDelete