U.S. Prosecutor Defends Charges Against Indian Diplomat

By BENJAMIN WEISER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

The federal prosecutor whose decision to charge an Indian diplomat in New York City last week touched off a furor in India has made an unusual and robust public defense of that decision, saying “there can be no plausible claim that this case was somehow unexpected or an injustice.”

The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Wednesday night that the diplomat’s conduct showed that “she clearly tried to evade U.S. law designed to protect from exploitation the domestic employees of diplomats and consular officers.”

The diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, 39, the deputy consul general in New York, has been accused of submitting false documents to obtain a work visa for a housekeeper. Indian officials have been quoted as saying that she was arrested and handcuffed as she was leaving her daughter at school, and there had been accounts that she was strip-searched and then held with drug addicts before being released on $250,000 bail.

The Indian government has complained bitterly about Ms. Khobragade’s treatment. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the arrest deplorable, newspaper editorials have expressed outrage and the police have removed barriers meant to protect the United States Embassy.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid of India said that the charges against Ms. Khobragade should be dropped immediately.

“We are not convinced there is a legitimate legal ground for pursuing this case,” he said. “The worst that can be said about her is that she did not comply with the amounts that was supposed to be paid under your law. I don’t think that justifies treating her like a common criminal.”

Mr. Khurshid said he was dismayed that Washington had provided visas to the family of the maid who made the complaint against Ms. Khobragade. “I don’t think they are so valuable to our relationship as a diplomatic officer of the government of India.”

Ms. Khobragade is the third Indian diplomat stationed in New York City in recent years to be accused of exploiting a domestic servant. In 2011, a maid accused Prabhu Daval of forcing her to work like a slave and sleep in a storage cupboard, and of confiscating her passport. In 2010, a judge ordered Neena Malhotra and her husband, Jogesh, to pay nearly $1.5 million for forcing an Indian girl to work without pay and meting out “barbaric treatment.”

Domestic servants in India routinely work dawn to dusk and six or seven days a week for minuscule wages. Their presence is ubiquitous in Indian middle-class and upper-class households, and many Indians of a certain class seemingly find it hard to imagine life without them — particularly families with children.

Asked why Indian diplomats seem to run afoul of U.S. wage-and-hour laws, Mr. Khurshid said that India might not pay its diplomats as much as ones working for the United States government.

“We try to ensure that they have enough to serve with dignity,” Mr. Khurshid said. “If there is a problem with your law and our settled wage scales, that’s something we need to talk about with your government.”

Mr. Bharara, in his statement, said that there had been “much misinformation and factual inaccuracy in the reporting” about the case, and the inaccuracies were “misleading people and creating an inflammatory atmosphere on an unfounded basis.” “Is it for U.S. prosecutors to look the other way, ignore the law and the civil rights of victims,” Mr. Bharara asked, “or is it the responsibility of the diplomats and consular officers and their government to make sure the law is observed?” “And one wonders,” Mr. Bharara added, “why there is so much outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian national accused of perpetrating these acts, but precious little outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian victim and her spouse?” Although his office did not take Ms. Khobragade into custody, Mr. Bharara said that she had been “accorded courtesies well beyond what other defendants, most of whom are American citizens, are accorded.” He said that State Department agents had arrested her “in the most discreet way possible,” and that unlike most defendants, she “was not then handcuffed or restrained.” The arresting authorities had not seized her telephone as they normally would have, Mr. Bharara said, and allowed her to make calls for about two hours, including to arrange for child care. Because it was cold outside, Mr. Bharara added, the agents “let her make those calls from their car and even brought her coffee and offered to get her food.” It was true, Mr. Bharara added, that Ms. Khobragade was “fully searched” in a private setting by a female deputy marshal when she was taken into the custody of the United States Marshals Service, which handled her detention. But, he said, “this is standard practice for every defendant, rich or poor, American or not, in order to make sure that no prisoner keeps anything on his person that could harm anyone, including himself.” The tone of Mr. Bharara’s statement, issued in the evening in New York, seemed in marked contrast to an expression of “regret” made earlier in the day by Secretary of State John Kerry in a call to a senior Indian official, as Mr. Kerry sought to ease tensions with India over the episode. Mr. Kerry’s call to the official, Shivshankar Menon, India’s national security adviser, was disclosed by the State Department in a statement.

“As a father of two daughters about the same age as Devyani Khobragade, the secretary empathizes with the sensitivities we are hearing from India about the events that unfolded after Ms. Khobragade’s arrest,” the State Department said in its statement.

“He expressed his regret, as well as his concern, that we not allow this unfortunate public issue to hurt our close and vital relationship with India,” it added.

Washington warned the Indian government of the investigation against Ms. Khobragade in a letter in September. Asked why the Indian government did not withdraw Ms. Khobragade then, Mr. Khurshid responded that he “didn’t expect this could happen.”

“Don’t hold it against us that we have trust and faith in the U.S. government and its liberal credentials,” he said.

Ms. Khobragade’s lawyer, Daniel N. Arshack, said Wednesday that his client would be pleading not guilty, that the allegations against her were “false and baseless” and that her diplomatic status protected her from prosecution.