Structural Realism - a theory to interpret International Politics

 

Khobhra-gate in New York may end nanny service for Indian diplomats

Chidanand Rajghatta in Times of India

WASHINGTON: Indian diplomats and officials serving abroad may lose the privilege of taking domestic help from India as a result of the Khobra-gate episode in New York where a mid-level Indian diplomat is in the dock for allegedly misrepresenting and underpaying her housekeeper.

The Indian government has vehemently challenged the US interpretation that led to the charges against Devyani Khobragade, but considering the number of such episodes in recent years and the financial implications (both in terms of legal fees to fight the cases and the restitution awarded to the complainants in some cases), the thinking is that the issue of taking domestic help abroad needs to be reexamined.

Even before the latest incident, the matter had been discussed at a Heads of Mission conference in New Delhi last year where various such cases were deliberated on. The ministry of external affairs is said to be looking for a long-term solution, including withdrawing the provision enabling taking housekeepers abroad, and instead compensating diplomats for employing local personnel.

This is easier said than done, according to some officials. Not only are there security sensitivities involved in going down this route (In case of the .S, there are also heightened intelligence issues considering recent developments,) but the costs will also be enormous given that diplomats often entertain late and travel at short notice.

Officials joked sourly that at $ 9.75 an hour in New York ($ 8.25 in Washington DC) plus overtime, any local labor they employ will earn more than the diplomats considered the hours they will be needed, while contesting the general impression that foreign postings are lavishly paid. The salaries are modest, they insist, and in fact it is the perks such as taking domestic help abroad that makes such postings tolerable they say.

In fact, federal minimum wages in the US, which is stuck at $ 7.25 since 2009, is poised to go up to $ 10 soon (some states like NY will mandate more in keeping with higher costs)

''Which Indian would pay a help Rs 6500 ($ 100) a day?'' asked Shakti Sinha, a former principal secretary in the government of India who did various stints abroad, including at the World Bank and various UN agencies, assuming eight normal working hours. Nevertheless, Sinha is for withdrawing the privilege of taking Indian help abroad while complying with local laws. At the same time, he says, New Delhi should also not ''spare any US diplomat who is even close to breaking any Indian domestic law.'' The suggestion here is that New Delhi does not similarly enforce its domestic laws strictly against foreign diplomats and officials.

Indeed, Indian officials say foreign diplomats in India, including US officials, will be on weak ground if New Delhi took their various infractions seriously but the Indian view is that diplomatic niceties need to be observed. They are incensed that in the case of Khobragade, the young mother of two was jumped on and handcuffed by US authorities when she was dropping her daughters to school. ''It was not as if she is a terrorist or proven criminal and was about to flee or was endangering lives,'' one official fumed. ''It could have been handled better.''

On Friday, Taranjit Sandhu, the charge d'affaires at the Indian Embassy in Washington once again conveyed New Delhi' displeasure at the incident, and according to an Embassy statement, ''reiterated Foreign Secretary of India's strong demarche to the US Ambassador in New Delhi regarding the treatment meted out to Dr Khobragade.''

''It was emphasised that Dr. Khobragade is a diplomat, who is in the U.S. in pursuance of her duties and hence is entitled to the courtesy due to a diplomat in the country of her work. She is also a young mother of two small children. Government of India is shocked and appalled at the manner in which she has been humiliated by the U.S. authorities. It was also conveyed in no uncertain terms that this kind of treatment to one of our diplomats is absolutely unacceptable,'' the statement said calling on the U.S. State Department ''to resolve the matter at the earliest''

But US officials were largely unrelenting in the matter. ''We are handling this incident through law enforcement channels. We have a long-standing partnership with India, and we expect that partnership will continue,'' a state department spokesperson told wire services.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Indian diplomat who is at the center of a flaming row between New Delhi and Washington is also a Dalit women's rights champion.

Devyani Khobragade, the deputy consul-general of the Indian mission in New York, spoke in April this year on ''Women's Rights and the Influence of Demographics in India'' at the Australian Consulate in Manhattan. ''The continued entrenchment of women's rights through affirmative action, such as reservations for women in parliament, a holistic approach to education and gender sensitisation were also discussed by Dr Khobragade and the round-table participants,'' according to the Australian consulate, which identified her as a ''woman of the Dalit caste.''

On the social media though, there was little sympathy for the diplomat, with some readers pointing to her involvement in the Adarsh housing issue, where she is reportedly a member. Her father Uttam Khobragade, is a retired Maharashtra government bureaucrat and former head of Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA).

Others recalled several notorious cases of Indian families mistreating their domestic help and using them as slave labor, although the U.S charges against Khobragade mainly pertained to fraud and misrepresentation, not abuse.

In one of the most egregious cases the wife-husband team of Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani, NRIs who owned a multi-million dollar perfume business in New York, were sentenced in 2007 to 11 and 3 years respectively for abusing their Indonesian housekeepers. Their callousness and brutality provoked such revulsion that New York tabloids dubbed Varsha Sabhnani as ''Cruella De Evil.'' The couple was also ordered to pay restitution of more than a million dollars to the women they enslaved.

While that episode brought to light what the judge hearing case called modern day slave labor practice, Bharara has signaled that the U.S will not tolerate exploitation of foreign workers even by diplomats.

''Foreign nationals brought to the United States to serve as domestic workers are entitled to the same protections against exploitation as those afforded to United States citizens. The false statements and fraud alleged to have occurred here were designed to circumvent those protections so that a visa would issue for a domestic worker who was promised far less than a fair wage. This type of fraud on the United States and exploitation of an individual will not be tolerated,'' he said in a statement.

But Indian officials insist there was no intended fraud or misrepresentation. They point out that the domestic help in this case, Sangeeta Richard, was flown to the U.S at government expense, and she had no problems with her wages, which were split between paying her in New York and her family in India, in the eight months she worked in the Khobragade household. Things only got complicated when she wanted to seek permanent residency in the US.

Officials explained that because diplomats typically take care of all the other needs of the domestic help brought from India, such as housing, food, medical treatment, and trips back home, their written commitment to mandated local wage in western countries ( $ 9.95 per hour of $ 4500 per month in the Khobragade case) is only of a ''technical nature.'' The real cost does work out approximately to that, they maintain, adding that the situation has become complicated because in several cases, the domestic help from India have figured out they can make a killing and gain permanent residence by ''going legal.''

But the flip side is that this is the third such case involving the Indian consulate in New York. In June 2011, a former housekeeper, Santosh Bharadwaj, had sued India's then consul general in New York Prabhu Dayal, accusing him of intimidating her into forced labor and seeking sexual favors. The case is close to being settled out of court. In February 2012, a New York City Magistrate Judge ordered that Neena Malhotra, a diplomat at the Consulate, to pay nearly $1.5 million for forcing an under-aged Indian girl, Shanti Gurung, to work without pay and meting out ''barbaric treatment'' to her. The case is still being contested. There have also been such cases in Europe.

In most cases, Indian officials insist the complainants, helped by NGOs, exaggerate and conflate issues in an effort to seek permanent residency and restitution. ''The same complainants have had no problems working with the same officials in places such as Morocco or Cambodia. It is only when they come to US or Western Europe that all these issues crop up,'' one official fumed.

But much of the public and media perception in New York has been shaped by one egregious case of domestic abuse (not involving Indian diplomats) that occurred in 2007. The wife-husband team of Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani, NRIs who owned a multi-million dollar perfume business in New York, were sentenced to 11 and 3 years respectively for abusing their Indonesian housekeepers. Their callousness and brutality provoked such revulsion that New York tabloids dubbed Varsha Sabhnani as ''Cruella De Evil.'' The couple was also ordered to pay restitution of more than a million dollars to the women they enslaved.

For many, the case encapsulated the Indian practice of treating domestic help badly. It's a rap that even diplomats have had to bear in the line of duty.

What lies beneath the mask of marriage

The dynamics of any couple - like that between Charles Saatchi and his wife Nigella Lawson - are hard to fathom, but conflict can be deceptively subtle

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson: their row has ignited an important debate Photo: Alan Davidson

By Kate Figes in The Telegrapg

6:20AM BST 19 Jun 2013

The photographs were indeed shocking. Charles Saatchi’s large hand around his wife Nigella’s Lawson’s throat as they sat having an alfresco lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair, London. It’s the haunting look of deep fear in Nigella’s eyes that suggests this is more than just a “playful tiff”, as Saatchi subsequently said, hours before receiving a police caution for assault. Nigella, who has moved out of the family home, temporarily at least, is nowhere to be seen.

The media storm surrounding these photos has highlighted what those helping the victims of domestic abuse have known for a long time – that it can affect couples of every social strata, even seemingly confident and successful women who have the means to leave. Domestic violence is one of the most unreported and misunderstood crimes. Two women a week are killed by someone they know well. Countless others live silently in fear for years of what their partner might do to them should they leave.
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But perhaps what these pictures prove best is our confusion around what domestic violence actually is. In the past two days there have been mountains of speculation around the Saatchi-Lawson marriage: Saatchi’s temperament (he’s “explosive”) and Nigella’s troubled past (her mother would “shout and say 'I’m going to hit you till you cry’ ”) have been cited in an attempt to explain what must surely have been an exception rather than the rule. We don’t want to believe otherwise from such a golden couple.

But a celebrity union is no different from any other marriage, and is just as prone to the wielding of power and control, which is of course the substance of most abuse. The black eyes, the woman beaten about so badly that she is forced to seek refuge with her children in an anonymous safe house is just the thin end of the wedge.

Within all relationships there is the potential for abuse because it can be so subtle. Most domestic abuse is emotional or psychological long before it becomes physical, with men and indeed women chipping away at the other person’s sense of self and self-confidence in small but significant ways. Over time, with enough undermining day after day, one makes the other feel so bad about themselves that they believe it when their partner says that nobody else could possibly want them, or love them like they do. 

Victims of abuse are often blamed for everything, shamed or humiliated in public. Their partner makes all the decisions or they find themselves increasingly isolated from family, friends or other sources of support. “It’s the insidious level of control, the petty enforcement of rules – anything from how you wrap up the cheese when you put it back in the fridge to how you close the car door,” one married woman told me for my book Couples: The Truth. “And you think this is just a small thing; OK, I will do that because it doesn’t matter. Now I can see that what I was giving him was power. That was before he started smashing up the furniture when he got angry, and then hitting me.”

Domestic abuse can be economic or financial as spouses (usually men, because they earn more) withhold money or credit cards, make a woman account for every penny she spends, or prevent her from having a job or pursuing her own career. And abuse can be sexual, not just in the form of marital rape or pressurising someone into sexual practices they would rather avoid, but also by withholding sex.

I will never forget one young woman I interviewed whose husband refused to have sex with her for four years. “He has killed my self-confidence because I feel completely unacknowledged as a woman, and humiliated, too, dressing up for him in sexy underwear and still being rejected. If he had been knocking me about for four years that would be acknowledged as unacceptable controlling behaviour, but this isn’t.”

Affairs, too, are often a form of abuse, taunting a spouse with the evidence but denying that anything is going on. Instead, accusations of paranoia are hurled back at the victim, dismantling their psyche still further.

Abuse builds when one person in a couple consistently tries to exert that dominance, through intimidation, threats, anger and violence against furniture and walls. There are arguments in every relationship. But there is a fine line between healthy, constructive disagreements that allow people to air resentments and express what they want, and destructive rows full of character assassination and blame.

When a strong man has an anger-management problem, women understandably feel compromised about standing up for themselves. Arguing back could make matters worse. Nigella has been quoted as saying about her marriage: “I’ll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness.”

No one can really understand what goes on in another person’s relationship. One’s own is enough of a mystery. But if I were to turn back the clock seven years and write my two books on relationships again, I would probably structure them differently around the subtleties of abuse because of what I now know.

What is clear to me is that we find it so hard to understand the very fine line between common relationship difficulties and abusive patterns of behaviour when we are in love with someone, and when there are so many other ties that bind us such as children, reputation, lack of money and not wanting to be alone.

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” is a naive statement and one that won’t help Nigella, or any other woman in a relationship with an “explosive” man whom she probably still loves.

Our ignorance about abuse is also compounded by the taboos surrounding relationships and family life. We believe our private lives should be kept private. We shouldn’t interfere in other people’s problems. People took photographs of Charles and Nigella, but nobody approached the table to ask if they were all right. And it is this hidden nature of family life that makes abuse harder to live with and 

harder to talk about. For a successful woman, just admitting that there have been abusive situations is tantamount to failure. And so, so shaming.

I wish them both well. Perhaps the most hopeful legacy from this whole sorry affair will be greater transparency about how common abuse can be. But I also believe that too many people lack the key tools to help them build their relationships from the inside, which in turn allows abuse to flourish. We can’t trust everything to love.

Be Your Own Dick Tracy

                 

Just walk into the nearest spyware shop, and grab the gizmo of your choice.

Arpita Basu 

In a basement office-cum-showroom off Green Park in south Delhi, a demo is in progress. “Recording time is 12 hours, the images and sounds will be so clear you can see and hear everything,” offers the sales assistant. The customer, a man in his 40s with dark-circled eyes, is convinced; the deal is sealed. In an hour or so, the digital table clock he just bought should be sitting on his bedside table; hopefully, worth every penny of the 12,000-odd rupees he spent on it.

The innocuous clock is in fact a spycam, bought to combat “domestic abuse” in his bedroom, he confesses, even as he advises us on the best cam for our job. There are, after all, plenty of options: caps, wristwatches, sunglasses, buttons, pens, belts, pendants, photo-frames, iPhone lookalikes, cola cans, even chewing gum packs, each fitted with pinhole cameras and tiny recording devices to be your eyes and ears when you need it to be.

For anything from Rs 1,500-Rs 30,000 or more, you can play detective with a lifetime’s supply of spy devices available off the internet, in discreet shops, or through smses peddling the snare ware. A request to an online directory for details of shops selling spyware like pen cameras throws up nine addresses in south Delhi alone. No wonder Bhavna Paliwal, director of Tejas Detective Agency, has had to reluctantly ditch the pen camera as a work tool because it is “so common now”. Clearly, spyware has stealthily attached itself to the underbelly of urban relationships, with spouses, partners, friends and colleagues relying increasingly on guileful gizmos to catch their kith and kin in the act.
Mueen Pasha, founder of the Bangalore-based Spy Zone, has been selling spy gadgets for eight years, but it’s only now that his business is truly thriving—he sells at least a hundred gadgets a month, in the price range of Rs 4,000-Rs 15,000. “Sales have gone up, and in the last two years, family problems have come to the fore. These days working hours are so long that one doesn’t know what is going on at home and some people will go to any lengths to find out.”

In Mumbai, Mahmood, a salesperson in a spyware shop he didn’t want named, says, “Most often people buy these gadgets when they suspect their partners of infidelity. Many discuss their problems in detail, so that we can suggest the best gadget. Others claim they want to fix cameras in their shops or homes after a theft, or to keep an eye on their domestic helps, but we can tell they are lying.”
He has seen enough customers to know that the real reasons may be very different. Sanjay Singh, director of Indian Detective Agency, doesn’t hesitate to call the use of spycams a ‘trend’. “People going for business meetings try to sneak in devices to record conversations. Many who come to us have already tried these DIY spykits,” he says. One woman, he recalls, approached him to help her bring her husband to book. The gentleman in question, she alleged, was enjoying the company of other women behind her back. “I was surprised by the knowledge she had about spy devices!” Singh says.
Paliwal too has had clients trying to cut costs by doing the digging themselves instead of hiring a private eye. “Very often they fail,” she laughs, recounting how a newly-married man tried hiding a tiny camera in the air cooler. Only, he hadn’t factored in his wife’s keen eyesight. “As it turned out, he had no reason to suspect her,” she says. Another client, a professional working in a multinational company, made a mess of “investigations” trying to record his wife entering her office. “Their divorce case was under way, and if he could prove she had got herself a job, he wouldn’t have to shell out maintenance money,” she explains.

So common are these devices, and so diverse their customers, that Devendra, from Anand India’s sales team, finds it difficult to sketch up a client profile. “Aajkal to bahut chal raha hai,” he concedes, counting journalists, lawyers, doctors, wives and husbands among his customers. One popular product, he says, is the spy bug—a matchbox-sized device fitted with a SIM, which can be yours for Rs 3,000. “Once you put the sim into the device, and call that number, you can hear whatever is going on around that device.” If that sounds difficult to pull off, it isn’t. Arun (name changed) vouches for it. His “friend”, he claims, had once hidden this spybug in his girlfriend’s handbag when she went to meet a former classmate. “He suspected the two of them were more than friends and figured that listening in on their conversation would clear things up.” Obviously, the girl’s word that there was no funny business going on wasn’t enough.

Paliwal feels shows like Emotional Atyachaar, where cheating partners are spied upon and confronted, sparked the dubious inclination to peep into our own bedrooms. This inclination has been fuelled by easy access and low prices. Singh says, “Five or six years ago, we would buy pen cameras for Rs 15,000-Rs 20,000. Now Chinese versions of it can be bought for Rs 1,500 or less.”
That cannot be good news for unsuspecting subjects at the receiving end. As Singh cautions, misuse is an obvious danger. “I know of teenagers using these gadgets, they are so tech-savvy anyway. People know all about these gizmos; even leading dailies run advertisements for them. Girls often bear the brunt, being filmed without their knowledge and viewed by hundreds once the video is posted online.”
Even if the footage is for the eyes of the “spy” alone, the act itself is an invasion of privacy, a breach of trust. As Paliwal asks, “Will a wife who knows that her husband tried to record her activities on the sly ever trust him again?” Whatever the answer to that, it is a risk not a few are clearly willing to take.

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