UPDATE
I have to correct a few things in this post.
While Devyani K. said she was cavity-searched, the US Marshals deny it. They say she was only strip-searched.
A cavity search, according to the Marshals, involves probing of the vagina and rectum.
Bharara used this discrepancy to claim that DK was lying.
But it turns out that a strip-search too involves “baring” the rectum and vagina.
It just doesn’t involve probing them.
To a woman like DK, who has no previous criminal record and is foreign to US procedure, the strip-search probably felt exactly like “cavity search.”
Both procedures are outrageous, regardless of the status of the person being stripped and search, Jane Citizen or a high-flying diplomat.
Point Two. DK was paid around $4000 a month by the Indian govt, but she did also receive free housing and other perks, as did her maid.
I wasn’t aware of that, when I wrote the piece.
DK is also married to an American professor who has an income allegedly of about $100,000. She has further modest income from her properties in India.
Because she didn’t include that property income on her government form, I suspect the USG considered the entire application a type of fraud.
Point Three.
Much is being made of the fact that DK is a dollar millionaire and that she profited from some finagling on her behalf by her father, a well-connected bureaucrat.
First point.
None of that is relevant to the way DK was treated by the police and the issue of diplomatic protocol, which was grossly violated, regardless of finer points about partial or full immunity and consular status.
All those issues are red herrings. The manner of proceeding was outrageous and provocative in the extreme.
Second.
Anyone who bought land in India in the early part of the last decade, especially in a major city, would have become a millionaire.
Land prices went up about 30 times in some areas. So if you put even very modest savings (and Indians save over 50% of their income), into land, you’d have made a fortune.
The Rothschild media is playing this up to stoke anger against her among Americans who would be ashamed to feel that way at poorer Indians, but can now vent essentially envious and racist feelings against an affluent one, and do so self-righteously, because they’ve dubbed her a “slaver.”
Third.
Khobradage’s father headed the Ministry of External Affiars (MEA) in Delhi, as did DK herself, and the MEA had a running battle with the US embassy.
The current Asst Secy of State for South Asia, an Indian woman, only came on board in October.
The DK affair began in June. At the time the Asst Secy for South Asia was a committed Zionist, known for meddling in domestic politics in Sri Lanka and India, where he earned a reputation as such.
The maid, recall, worked for a senior US diplomat and had relatives who worked in the US embassy, so she is by no means some oppressed Dalit villager.
Instead, she comes from the relatively prosperous state of Kerala, belongs to the Christian community, which if often closely affiliated with the Indian Jewish community (Arundhathi Roy is a Syrian Christian).
Kerala is heavily unionized and Marxist. It’s also a center of the drug trade, centering around Kochi, with the international drug cartels having close ties with and backing from the CIA ….(it goes on, but that’s enough for now).
ORIGINAL POST
One Swati Sharma at the establishment’s favorite mouthpiece, The Washington Post, tells us seriously that India’s reaction to the rape, er, cavity-search of Devyani Khobragade, an Indian consular officer, is all wrong.
Devyani was arrested and cavity-searched on allegations (I repeat allegations) that she underpaid her Indian maid and lied about it to the visa office of the US Government.
The Indian government quite correctly regards the cavity search as not only an outrageous violation of diplomatic protocol but barbaric treatment of a mother with two children.
There’s nothing, absolutely NOTHING, wrong with that assessment.
It is the reaction of NORMAL people everywhere.
Ms. Sharma and her sort are not normal.
Enlightened by the communist belief in complete gender-equality as well as the sanctity of all government action against unenlightened citizens, Sharma believes that a blow has been struck by India against the empowerment of women.
Truly empowered women allow their vaginas to be fingered by strangers in uniforms with equanimity, nay, delight, and if their name is also Naomi Klein Wolf and the fingerer is a a former military officer-turned Tantric sex therapist, with effusions of literary joy.
Sharma is upset not by the cavity search, but by the special Indian outrage she sees directed at the cavity-search of a woman.
This is a sign of India being all wrong, she wails.
Here’s something for this nitwit, who apparently takes her standards uncritically from some combination of Lady Gaga, Annie Sprinkle, and Karl Marx (my comments in between):
SWATI SHARMA
“Last week, the United States apprehended an Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, and charged her with providing false information in a visa application for her nanny, whom she paid $3.31 an hour, well below minimum wage. Many are wondering why India is outraged.”
LILA RAJIVA: Misleading statement. Devyani did not pay her maid just $3.30 an hour. She also provided living quarters in New York City (worth $3000-4000 a month), food, medicine, and other perks, the total of which probably exceeds anything required of her by US law, even assuming foreign maids employed by foreign consular officers are properly a subject of US law.
Also, “many” are not wondering why India is outraged. You and some twitterati – like Sandeep Roy – might be wondering. Everyone else IS outraged.
The twitterati are known to be used – and in some cases employed – by the US intelligence services to mold public opinion.
One can be forgiven for wondering if Ms. Sharma belongs to that group.
SHARMA:
In a letter to her colleagues, Khobragade, India’s deputy consul general, told her family that she faced “indignities of repeated handcuffing, stripping and cavity searches, swabbing, hold up with common criminals and drug addicts were all being imposed upon me despite my incessant assertions of immunity.” U.S. officials maintain that she was treated along standard guidelines. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh even weighed in on the matter, calling Khobragade’s treatment “deplorable.”
Although Khobragade’s “indignities” seem pretty standard, in India, the perception that a woman’s honor is the community, society and country’s honor still holds.”
RAJIVA: The utterly immoral position taken here is that there is nothing wrong (“seem pretty standard”) with someone being strip-searched by the police for an alleged violation that doesn’t involve concealing anything on one’s person.
Even in the case of suspected drug-mules, there are precautions taken and procedures followed and a cavity search occurs only after the suspect has REFUSED to cooperate in other ways. There is nothing “standard” about a cavity search. It has become standard because we have journalists of the caliber of this vacuous female who apparently thinks anything the government does or says is to be accepted at face value as “the public good.”
God help us all.
And yes, the concept of a woman’s honor still holds in some form or other all over the world. That you do not agree with it or believe you have more enlightened standards does not mean, of course, that you actually do.
SHARMA:
It’s not the first time an Indian diplomat has gotten in trouble over this issue — last February, Neena Malhotra was ordered to pay $1.5 million to her former maid for “barbaric” conditions. But there was no strip-search, no jail time and, therefore, no mass protests.
RAJIVA: It is not clear what happened in the Malhotra case. I for one find it very odd and believe that the diplomat was being entrapped, which perhaps is what happened here, but it would be foolish to pass judgment without knowing all the facts.
And yes. The issue is whether someone’s bodily integrity and modesty should be violated in an extreme manner that would be considered rape, if a citizen were the perpetrator.
SHARMA
She was treated as a common criminal.
It’s also not every day that a high-ranking official is put behind bars, especially for a charge many Indians feel is minor. Khobragade was impounded with people who faced drug-related charges — which are minor in the U.S. penal system. But in India, a female diplomat in jail over a salary issue for her nanny is almost unimaginable, and not a picture Indians are used to seeing.
RAJIVA: Yes. It is unimaginable. Again, what’s the point?
SHARMA
It’s not just the privileged in India who have help. According to this report, “The going monthly rate for a live-in maid or cook, who often works for more than 12 hours a day, six days a week, is still low: only 4,000-10,000 rupees ($73-184) in the cities.”
RAJIVA:
This whole section is baffling and seems to be an open stoking of class-anger and racial resentment among Americans, directing it against relatively affluent/prominent Indians, rather than against the Anglo-Jewish cartel- that, via central banking, is really behind the economic crisis.
In addition, Sharma’s facts are mistaken.
Most maids get free living quarters, free medicine and free food.
4000-10000 rupees is a lot of money in India. Why give the dollar figures without also giving the dollar figures for food and rent in India, which are much lower than in the US?
This is the kind of bogus documentation that makes contemporary American journalism cringe-worthy.
SHARMA
While having servants or chauffeurs in the United States is a luxury attained by a select few, even lower-middle-class families in India have some sort of hired help.
RAJIVA:
More class and race war.
In the US, women have appliances and restaurant and food options FAR out of the reach of the middle-class and even the rich in India. Indian roads are so congested and polluted and the shops so overcrowded and hard to access that paying someone else to queue for you at stores is mandatory if you have a professional job.
Most Americans have two or more cars in the family. Even poor people have cars. In India, many in the upper middle-class do not. A car is a luxury.
So lifestyles are adapted to different economic realities.
Labor is plentiful in India so it is cheap. Labor is not plentiful here because of immigration restrictions, so it is dear. Americans also make twenty times or more than most Indians and ready made food is far cheaper here than there. So having servants who can cook elaborate Indian meals is more prevalent.
Gas is cheap in the US and expensive in India. Thus, by Sharma’s logic, the Indian government should be allowed to set the gas prices in the US so that things are evened out.
This is the madness of die-hard communist ideology, masquerading as liberalism.
SHARMA
In this case, the treatment of the women in question wasn’t about any form of abuse — it was about a payment discrepancy. In India, that would rarely amount to jail time, especially for someone with means.
RAJIVA
It’s not clear that Devyani’s means were all that much. As a consular office, she received some $4000 a month, which is barely adequate in New York.
SHARMA
This isn’t the first time diplomats received what Indians thought was “unfair” treatment.
In 2010, India’s U.N. envoy, Hardeep Puri,who wore a turban for religious reasons, was reportedly asked to remove it during an airport security check. Also that year, reports suggested that Indian ambassador Meera Shankar was taken to another room and searched because she was wearing a sari. Those events stung in India, and no doubt came to mind when this latest event dominated the headlines.
RAJIVA:
Had Bill Clinton been frisked, or Ms Clinton or Mrs. Obama taken into custody and had their vaginas penetrated and swabbed by Indian policemen, I rather think the US would have nuked Delhi by now. Had a Mullah been asked to remove his turban, there would have been global jihad.
Are some indignities less than others?
SHARMA
Little attention has been given to the housekeeper. India is siding with a woman who was in the wrong — who lied, paid her help poorly and now is brazen enough to claim that she should not be treated like a criminal.
RAJIVA:
You claim to be a journalist, yet you have already decided what looks like a complicated case. How do you know?
Are you one of the many hirelings of the CIA who are paid to influence stories by planting opinions, twitters, blog comments, or posts intended to push public opinion in the direction it’s supposed to go.
We saw evidence of that in the Tahrir square “color” revolution led by the twitter brigades of the intelligence services.
Devyani claims, with evidence, that this is an extortion case. How do you know she isn’t right?
SHARMA
What’s “deplorable,” to use the prime minister’s words, is not Khobragade’s treatment, which was standard, but the fact that many in India aren’t speaking out against the treatment of the nanny.
RAJIVA
They’re not speaking out is another way of saying this intelligence psyop intended to “educate” India and the world is failing. This is a nearly transparent attempt to set classes and races at war in order to destroy opposition to the globalists, but it is not going well.
The “ill-treatment” of the maid is so far only alleged. There is also a history of maids extorting their employers. This maid’s family worked for the US embassy. There are extortion rackets that use false abuse charges to gain visas to the US.
That’s why intelligent people who are aware of all the facts are outraged by the treatment of the consular officer before the facts, let alone the case, have been decided.
SHARMA
India’s reaction is disappointing.
RAJIVA
Not to me. I am immensely heartened that India is showing a spine and not fawning on the US.
However, this article is immensely disappointing…and disgusting. It shows that the author has a thoroughly colonized mind, unable to reach conclusions not already fed to her by the dominant culture.
SHARMA
The anti-corruption party in India is gaining incredible momentum — the party even unseated the ruling Congress party in the country’s capital, which was a huge victory.
RAJIVA:
Most Indians are well-aware of corruption in their country. They are also well aware that the Rothschild banking cartel (globalists) have used their mouthpieces, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, to co-opt the original anti-corruption movement (like the movement of Baba Ramdev) and replace it with Trojan horses like the Anna Hazare movement, intended to subjugate Indian sovereignty to secret foreign rule through NGO’s.
What happened to the Ramdev movement is what happened to the Tea Party. It got co-opted.
SHARMA
So why are Indians rallying for a privileged treatment of a diplomat?
RAJIVA
They are rallying AGAINST the barbaric treatment of a woman who has not been judged guilty of anything, certainly of nothing serious enough to warrant cavity searches.
They are rallying against the privileged treatment of US law, which has shown itself to be as corrupt or more corrupt than Indian law in many respects and, in any case, should not prevail in a case involving two Indian citizens both employed by the Indian govt.
Because you are a US citizen, Mr. Sharma, it doesn’t mean your opinion is worth more than that of an Indian on Indian matters.
Indians are rallying against the privileged treatment of your opinion and the opinion of thousands of “elite” opinion-makers who force-feed them cultural standards they do not believe in and do not want.
SHARMA
Why shouldn’t she be treated as a common criminal?
RAJIVA:
Because she is not either. She is not a common person but a diplomatic officer representing a country which is an ally, a status which grants her certain privileges and immunities.
And she has not been convicted of any crime, let alone one warranting multiple searches of her private parts.
The offense for which she was arrested is relatively petty and is one of which thousands of professionals, Americans included, are guilty. CEO’s. university professors and many, many other people pay their employees less than the minimum wage
Are you strip-searching all of them? If not, why not?
SHARMA
In India, someone with power would rarely be apprehended for paying a servant a low wage.
RAJIVA
Good for India.
Since when is paying someone according to a voluntary contract a crime?
SHARMA
Actually, it’s laughable to think such a charge would even take place. But there was hope that a movement against corruption would change things.
RAJIVA
This passage is completely addled, even for Ms Sharma. What has a movement against corruption got to do with the wage-rate in India? And what makes you an expert on either?
SHARMA
After the global outrage and mass protests in India due to the Delhi gang rape that happened a little over a year ago, there was hope that unfair treatment toward women and opposition to immunity would skyrocket.
RAJIVA
It is a myth propagated by US intelligence that Indian women are treated with exceptional barbarity or that they are in need of Western-style liberation. Actually, rape cases have exploded precisely since the liberalization of the Indian economy and the advent of Western mores, including pornography in the media, extreme crowding in the cities and massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.
That is the RESULT of interaction with the West on its terms, rather than on Indian terms.
The solution is not more Westernization, but less. The Indian constitution is very socialistic in orientation and its emphasis on human rights exceeds that of the US, so it certainly doesn’t need any more “feminist” empowerment. It needs less. It needs, as the US needs too, a return to less emphasis on “rights” and more on obligations and duties.
India guarantees women positions in university and jobs and has done so even before the US (even if you think such quotas are a good thing, which I don’t). India has had a woman prime minister and several very powerful female politicians. In contrast, the US has had no female president and no woman politician of commensurate power.
Harassment and rape in India have increased only with economic liberalization and with the recent saturation of Indian media with crass sexualized advertising on the Western model.
That seems intended to destroy the social fabric in India.
Having abetted that destruction, the West and its mouthpieces, like Ms Sharma, are now bewildered at the rise in violence against women, although that too, I suspect is played up by the US and the NGOs it employs as its soft-power arm.
I wonder if some of these cases and the media attention to them are not staged. It would be no surprise, since almost all of the major media in the English language in India is owned by the big Western media groups, by communists, and by Zionist Christians.
SHARMA
Instead, many Indians are siding with the wrong woman in this battle.
RAJIVA
No. They..and any reasonably informed person..are siding with the victim. In this case, that was the woman who, before she was even tried by a jury of her peers, was subjected to gross public humiliation and physical distress to feed the self-righteousness of uninformed ignoramuses like Sharma, who are upset by rape committed by citizens but not rape committed by officers with badges.
SHARMA
Like we saw with India’s anti-gay ruling last week, the country is in the wrong once again.
RAJIVA
Actually, I think the Indian Supreme Court is to be applauded for the ruling, which should reflect Indian thinking about the subject, not the thinking of Ms. Sharma or her coterie of international busy-bodies.
Note (added Dec 20): I do not support laws criminalizing sodomy or homo-sexuality, but neither am I particularly interested in codifying homosexual relations in the way heterosexual relations are. I recognize a distinction between the two both in history and in law, which allows for different treatment.
However, I am not an Indian citizen and I support the rights of every judiciary to come to its own conclusions about its own laws without foreign interference.
Further note: Reading more, I begin to see the SC’s thinking on this matter. Homo and heterosexuality are two different things and merit different treatments. The law has never given rise to even one prosecution and therefore cannot be said to have discriminated in reality. It was more a signaling device and, as the court decided, such a signaling might be thoroughly needed today. There is nothing in human history and moral teaching that suggests that homosexuality can be the NORM for a society. It can only be tolerated when it doesn’t seek to change the norm. I think that’s a defensible position and were it not for the hype, I think it would get a respectful hearing.
So the question must be asked. Are gays really only interested in being left alone (they already are) or is it that they are unwilling to leave any one else alone?
