Update: More misunderstanding: The US Marshals deny that she was cavity-searched, by the standards of what THEY mean by cavity-searches, which is  digital probing of the body-cavities. That didn’t happen, it seems.

But, Devyani claims she WAS cavity-searched (she never specified digital penetration – that was assumed by many people, including me, erroneously), by which she apparently meant the VISUAL INSPECTION of body-cavities –  also a gross indignity and violation of privacy.

Visual inspection body cavities is part of all strip-searches and is violative enough to be an extreme measure, so for Bharara to claim that there were NO cavity-searches ,as such, is misleading and inflammatory. He knows perfectly well that she, as an Indian citizen, would not be aware of such distinctions.

So, while she didn’t suffer bodily probing, she did suffer visual inspection of the cavities, which is in itself quite outrageous, whoever the subject is and whatever the offense, as long as there was no suspicion of hidden contraband or weapons.

Update: Strip-searches are photographed. Presumably, cavity-searches are also photographed. Where are these photographs kept? Only on the security cameras or elsewhere? If they are archived elsewhere are they shared with the intelligence agencies?

Update: Bryan Fischer, a conservative Christian preacher, suggests that the arrest was “payback” for the Indian Supreme Court ruling criminalizing homosexuality. This would seem far-fetched, except for some things:

The resume of Dana Sussman, the attorney defending Khobragade, who is a gender feminist and abortion rights activist and is very active in the victims services industry.

The :”cavity-search” of Devyani, which seems intentionally provocative.

The close alignment of the maid with the US embassy, so much so that they violated court orders in India to spirit her out of the country, buying her air-tickets while making use of an exemption from taxes available only to diplomats.

Repeated erroneous statements from the US. Bharara insisted that Devyani wasn’t cavity-searched, when she was. Now, it turns out that the government agent misread the visa application and thought the figure in the column for Devyani’s salary (4500) was what she intended to pay the maid.

The general up-roar in the West and among various Western mouthpieces in India about the Supreme Court ruling on gays.

[The ruling doesn’t seem to me to deserve the uproar. One would have to search quite hard to find many gays in India, although they certainly do exist. The whole thing is mightily exaggerated.  I don’t know why the old colonial law which was struck down not too long ago should be considered such a threat to civilization, since I don’t recall anyone being prosecuted under it. But perhaps they were and I just wasn’t aware.

However, I don’t see why it’s OK to criminalize voluntary labor contracts  (minimum wage laws) but it’s terribly evil to criminalize voluntary sexual contacts. There are arguments to be made on both issues, on both sides. But it is very interesting that people who think nothing about interfering in reasonable labor contracts get so very upset about interfering in sexual conduct that has been strongly prohibited for, um, over 2000 years…

In any case, my quarrel is less with homosexuals, among whom I’ve had several good friends.  It is  with the homosexual lobby and its fellow travelers, who insist on demonizing the religious conscience of conservatives.]

Update: Daniel Arshak, the lawyer representing Khobragade, says a US official bungled when claiming that Khobgragade lied to the government. The official/agent mistook Khobragade’s statement of her salary ($4500) in some official forms for a claim that she was going to pay her maid that sum. I wonder how much attention the Rothschild media (world English language media) will give that.

Meanwhile, as one would expect, former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, Tamil chauvinist Karunanidhi took a swipe at the Indian government for its strong stand on the incident by comparing that to the governments silence on the killing of Indian fishermen by Sri Lanka and on the (alleged atrocities) committed by Sri Lanka against the LTTE.

I say it’s expected, because, as I’ve repeatedly blogged here, the south of India, especially Tamil Nadu, has been increasingly drawn into the Rothschild orbit.

All its English language media is owned by Christian or Communist entities beholden to the Rothschilds. These entities are closely tied to the funding and hyping of LTTE concerns that is the result of business alliances with the prominent media/political clan, the Maran family, to which Karunanidhi is related.

The globalists wish to break off Tamil Nadu and the south, Christianize it, and dominate the subcontinent through it, because of its rich biodiversity, cultural importance (the oldest extant culture) and strategic and economic significance.

As to corruption, nothing and no one could be more corrupt than Tamil politicians, most of whom have been assiduously courted and bribed by the West to play their appointed roles.   However, human rights Trojan Horse NGOs are never worried about that kind of corruption.  Corruption is only a pretext for intervention.

Update: See also the  2-part series on the espionage angle from GreatGameIndia:

“The entire family [Lila: the maid’s family, two members of which worked for the US embassy] could not have been spirited out of India, the manner in which it was done, without engineering some extremely sensational diplomatic incident, which carried both the stamp of morality and the object of provocation.

ORIGINAL POST

Kingshuk Nag advances a plausible theory that covers many bases of this strange case:

Devyani’s father, Uttam Khobargade, now suspects that the maid Sangeeta Richard was a CIA agent. Foreign office sources say that as deputy consul general in New York, Devyani was not privy to any strategic secrets. So if an agent was planted in her house it was only to cultivate her for the ‘long run’. After all in the long run, Devyani would only go in one direction in her career – upwards.

There is no gainsaying that intelligence agents are not planted in the house or office of every foreign service officer. That leads to the question: why was Devyani chosen? Indian intelligence analysts say that this was possible because US intelligence agencies perceived – rightly or wrongly – that  Devyani had many weaknesses. The first weakness was that she had married an Indian-American who at least till they got married had a US citizenship. Under the rules applicable to Indian foreign service officers, they cannot marry foreign citizens. In the present case, Devyani’s husband would have to give up his citizenship and take up Indian citizenship. I do not know whether Devyani’s hubby Aakash Singh Rathore has done this. For those who came in late, as reported in TOI, Aakash is a professor of philosophy who takes deep interests in wine matters. It is not clear whether Aakash has taken up Indian citizenship or taken up a PIO (Person of Indian Origin card). But what is strange is that in the whole matter concerning his wife he is nowhere to be heard or seen. He is obviously keeping a studied silence. Aakash did not migrate to the US recently; he was born in New York, so it was probably his father who moved to the US.
This leads to Devyani’s second weakness: likely inclination to continue in the US for long to be with her hubby. Devyani’s name has cropped up in the Adarsh scam. This is another weakness. Foreign agents love to cultivate officers who are vulnerable even if it is in their domestic country. Reports also indicate that she had used pressure to get her foreign language training in German at the cost of some of her batchmates who had a higher rank and that this was a subject matter of dispute in court. Subsequently, Devyani was posted in Berlin. She is believed to have met Aakash while undergoing German language training at the Goethe Institute in that country.

Foreign service officers who worked with Devyani assert that they strongly believe that she had political ambitions and would have certainly contested elections in the future (now the possibility increases with all the sympathy she is garnering). This would have made Devyani a rather attractive proposition for any spy agency. What better than have an upward mobile officer who could become a future lawmaker, in their pocket?

Devyani also committed a blunder by paying Sangeeta less than what she promised to pay her. This is precisely what officially the case is all about.

The most important issue is, why did Sangeeta Richard then give up her cover and focus attention on Devyani? There are no easy answers but it is conceivable that Devyani realized that she was being watched and put pressure on Sangeeta to sing pointing out that she was vulnerable because her family was still in India.

[Lila: A much more plausible hypothesis is that the maid – rather well-fed and well-clothed from her photos) was looking for a green-card and used the easy route of false abuse charges, snookering a self-styled gender feminist activist/pro-abortion liberal democrat partisan, Dana Sussman, part of the extremely well-funded and Rothchild connected victim industry in New York, which instead of going after real slavery often runs intel scams, knowingly or not.]

If this is the case, then kudos to Devyani for being smart enough to realize that she was being targeted. As pressure mounted on her Sangeeta first ran away and then put counterpressure on Devyani by filing a case. She possibly had help also from a US diplomat at whose whom she worked in New Delhi.

Devyani went to meet Sangeeta’s lawyer but what transpired is not known. Meanwhile, to protect Sangeeta, US agencies went an extra mile to evacuate Sangeeta’s husband and two kids before arresting Devyani. There is no gainsaying that Indo-American Preet Bharara (who as a neo-convert is trying to be more loyal than the king; he was born in Ferozepur) overdid his bit and the US agencies handcuffed and strip-searched Devyani. This has caused a furore in India and has gone against the Americans whether they admit it or not.

Domestic politics is making foreign minister Salman Khurshid overreact. The fear of Modi looms large: Khurshid expects Modi to shout from the rooftops that the Indian government can’t even protect its women diplomats from humiliation abroad. If the pitch is raised, the move has the potential to cost Congress valuable votes in the forthcoming elections. Modi has, however,  done nothing of the sort, but Khurshid can’t take him for granted (don’t forget Modi has been denied a US visa). In the process, Khurshid has done something that leaves Devyani vulnerable. She has been withdrawn from the New York consulate, where she had limited diplomatic immunity and posted to the UN, where she will get full diplomatic immunity. But this full immunity will be applicable to her from the date that the US government accepts her as a diplomat accredited to the UN. In the interim, she is left without any diplomatic cover.

So, in the ultimate analysis, is it a case of spying gone awfully wrong?