India shows who's boss

India shows who's boss

Jan 10th 2014,

WITH, in the words of her lawyer, “her head held high”, the New York-based Indian diplomat at the centre of her country’s worst row with America in years, has left the country. Devyani Khobragde, charged with paying her maid too little and committing fraud to obtain a visa for her, was asked to leave after being formally indicted. Crucially, America's State Department had approved her transfer to a job at the UN, in which she enjoyed full diplomatic immunity.

The Indian government and public had been outraged by her arrest last month, which she said involved handcuffs, strip-searching and time in the lock-up with common criminals and drug addicts.

The government had taken reprisals against American diplomats in India—removing the security roadblocks outside the embassy in Delhi, for example, halting its import clearances (no cheap booze!) and investigating what Americans paid their domestic staff in India.

An American Congressional delegation found itself snubbed in Delhi. And this month, America’s energy secretary, Enest Moniz, had to cancel a planned trip to India.

Since America and India say they want to be “strategic partners”, the unseemly squabble not just embarrassing; it had an importance entirely out of proportion to the seemingly rather trivial cause.

In trying to resolve it, the State Department has made the big concession. It amounts to a tacit admission that the arrest was poorly handled, whether or not Ms Khobragade should have enjoyed immunity at the time of her arrest.

India’s government will feel vindicated for its tough stance. Not just did it feel it had to take a strong stand in defence of Indian national dignity. It also will have been conscious that, with an election looming, the issue might cost it votes, if it were not seen to be protecting an Indian citizen's interests. Moreover, Ms Khobragade is a Dalit, a member of the group once called untouchable, which accounts for more than 15% of the electorate.

However, the row may linger on. Ms Khobragde has left her family in New York. They may not want to leave—her husband is an American citizen of Indian origin, and their two children are in school. Since officially her charges are still “pending”, she will need the protection of full immunity to visit them.

More fundamentally, the tiff has uncovered a deep rift in the two countries’ perceptions of one another. From the Indian perspective, America remains unwilling to afford it the respect a true partner deserves. And from the American, the Indian response reveals both a brittle anxiety about its own status and a callous disregard for the well-being of the person the American justice system saw as the victim in this story—the maid. Rather than partners, the two countries look like strangers.