Indian Diplomat’s Strip-Search Triggers Fight With U.S.

[mfcorey1]

India scaled back security outside the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and revoked transit privileges for American diplomats as a row deepened over the arrest and strip-search of a consular official in New York.

The Indian official, Devyani Khobragade, 39, who was arrested on Dec. 12, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues that she was subjected to cavity search during detention. India retaliated by removing concrete barricades outside the consular section of the embassy in the nation’s capital, canceling airport passes for U.S. diplomats and freezing import requests, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid said in parliament today.

Mounting tensions threaten to damage what has otherwise been a decade of collaboration between the world’s two biggest democracies as they deepen trade and defense ties and strengthen cooperation to fight terrorism. During his visit in November 2010, President Barack Obama called the relationship with India, a Cold War ally of the Soviet Union, “one of the defining and indispensable partnerships of the 21st century.”

“It takes a long time to build up a relationship of mutual trust and it is very easy to spoil it with such an incident,” said S. Chandrasekharan, director of the New Delhi-based South Asian Analysis Group. “People are reacting like the entire country has been insulted, not just one individual.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-17/indian-diplomat-arrested-was-strip-searched-u-s-says-correct-.html

[Cicada]

1. Power corrupts, and police have almost unchecked power

[RC]

2. We're still called a Democracy, huh?

I wonder how long that fiction will go on? We stopped being a Democracy in 2001, with 9/11 being the excuse for redacting important parts of our Constitution. With the loss of our Constitutional Rights, being codified into law, by what often amounts to Kangaroo courts.

[Baitball Blogger]

3. What was the grounds for the arrest?

Not that it will make it acceptable, but exactly how did the Indian official get targeted?

[intaglio]

4. Being arrested whilst Brown

Probably ...

[jsr]

5. Visa fraud

and making false statements to State Dept. to obtain said visa.