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December 14, 2013

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India protests arrest of top envoy in US

India summoned the US ambassador to New Delhi yesterday to protest the “humiliating” arrest of a diplomat while dropping her children at a school in New York, the foreign ministry said.

Ambassador Nancy Powell was summoned to a meeting with Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh, the day after the detention of deputy consul general Devyani Khobragade, ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin said. “We are shocked and appalled at the way she had been humiliated and this will be taken up forcefully with the US,” said Akbaruddin.

“She was pursuing her duties and is entitled to courtesies of a serving diplomat.

“This kind of behavior against the Indian diplomat, a young woman with two children is entirely unacceptable.”

Indian media reports said the New York-based Khobragade was arrested and handcuffed in public for allegedly lying on the US visa application for an Indian national who worked for her as a domestic help.

The Indian embassy in Washington said the detention was based on “allegations raised by the officer’s former India-based domestic assistant.”

The domestic worker had “absconded” from her employer in June and was already the subject of an injunction issued by the High Court in Delhi, the embassy said on its website.

“The legal aspect of it is separate and there is no justification for what has happened to the young woman,” Akbaruddin told reporters in New Delhi.

In response to a question that the diplomat has been accused of forging documents, the spokesman said that did not justify Khobragade’s treatment. “It still doesn’t absolve the US authorities of traumatizing and humiliating the Indian diplomat who was doing her duties in the US,” Akbaruddin said.


 

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