First the facts of the case: When Devyani Khobragade, India's Deputy Consul in New York, applied for a visa to come to the United States, she said she was bringing a nanny with her from India. And she agreed to pay her household worker nearly $10 an hour, which was in line with New York City wages. Instead, she paid the nanny $573 for the month or $3.31 an hour. Khobragade paid her what she might have earned in India, where you can pay shit wages because, well, hell, talk to a bunch of U.S. companies about that. Unfortunately for Khobragade, she was in the United States, and you can be pretty sure that if an American went to India and tried to get American wages for domestic work, she'd be laughed at and then probably beaten.
So Khobragade was arrested and processed for violation of a couple of laws there, including lying on her visa application and, you know, paying $3.31 an hour. As part of being processed and jailed, she was strip-searched, which, yes, is problematic on many levels and barbaric for everyone arrested, American, Indian, or whoever. She was put in a cell with other prisoners, and she was swabbed for her DNA. No different than any other prisoner in New York City. She was bailed out within 2 hours of her arrest. Sure, spreading your ass cheeks under duress for strangers is an awful experience. But so is living on $573 a month in New York City.
Indian politicians and diplomats have gotten themselves all worked up about how Khobragade was treated "like a common criminal." Actually, India's lost its shit over this, especially because Khobragade kept yelling that she had "diplomatic immunity" to the U.S. Marshals who arrested and booked her. The Indian government is taking various punitive measures against our embassy and consulate workers, who, one should note, have not been accused of a crime. The Indian government removed security barriers at the embassy because allowing a car bomb to kill dozens of people would apparently be a fair trade-off for making an upper middle class Indian woman sit next to "drug addicts" for a couple of hours. There have been protests in the streets, probably the burning of an American flag or two, you know, the usual shit that sometimes we deserve and sometimes we don't. The protesters are saying that Khobragade's treatment was "an insult to all Indian women."
And that's where you lose the Rude Pundit, India. Because, see, that picture up there is from something that actually matters. It's a demonstration marking the one-year anniversary of the New Delhi gang rape and murder that so horrified the world and brought attention to just how fucked up are Indian attitudes towards women.
You wanna know what's an insult to women? "In Delhi, out of the 754 men arrested on rape charges last year, only one was convicted while the rest were facing pending investigations or trials." That's a fuckin' insult. The entire rape culture of India, while changing by baby steps since last year, is a fuckin' insult.
So between that and the sweatshops and the honor killings and the female feticide and the sexual exploitation and trafficking, you should just shut the fuck up about what degrades women, India.
And let's be honest here. If this had been some random poor woman, India wouldn't have given an elephant's fart's worth of concern. Indeed, in India, there's been more anger about Khobragade taking off her clothes than there has been at the actual charges. As Human Rights Watch reports, "[M]any commentators have leapt to Khobragade’s defense, saying she could not be expected to pay her nanny US$4,500 per month, more than her Indian government salary."
Yeah, India, by all means, let's have a conversation about who is degrading whom.
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