From today's Washington Post:
India’s Devyani Khobragade advocated for women’s rights, accused in nanny scandal
STRINGER/Reuters - India's Deputy Consul General in New York, Devyani Khobragade, attends a Rutgers University event at India's Consulate General in New York on June 19.
By
Annie Gowen, Published: December 20
NEW DELHI — A week after the arrest and strip-search of
an Indian diplomat in New
York caused an
international firestorm, new details are emerging about the woman at the center of the controversy, a professional who advocated for women’s rights in public but is accused of underpaying her nanny at home.
Devyani Khobragade, 39, handled women’s affairs as well as political and economic issues in her job as deputy consul general for India in New York, which she began last November. Posts on her Facebook page show her wearing perfectly draped saris and meeting with one group of female Asian entrepreneurs and another of women doctors.
Khobragade was born in a town near Mumbai, into a family of Dalits — the name for the country’s lowest caste, once called the “untouchables.” Her professional success shows how far India has come in recent years.
Her father, a bureaucrat, owed his career in part to a policy to set aside 15 percent of jobs in India’s government for members of lower castes. His daughter benefited from this quota when she joined the foreign service in 1999.
The Khobragades are a prominent family from a sub-caste of Dalits called Mahars, who were once street sweepers and village watchmen forbidden to enter temples or drink water from the same wells as the upper castes. In recent years, as India’s rigid system of social stratification weakened, Mahars have risen to prosperity and professional careers.
“Their life is far better than it was 40 years ago,” said Badri Narayan, a social scientist and expert on Dalit issues at the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute in Allahabad. “They’re very assertive against any kind of discrimination.”
Khobragade’s father, Uttam Khobragade, said Friday that the family experienced little discrimination during his daughter’s youth, when she was a studious and “extremely bold child” who river-rafted and won a gold medal in a horse show.
On her first diplomatic posting, in Germany, she met an academic, Akash Singh, who would become her husband — “a love marriage,” her father said. The couple has two daughters, ages 7 and 4.
Later, while she was stationed in Pakistan, Khobragade bought a flat in the Adarsh Housing Society cooperative in Mumbai, a move that has dogged her and her family for a decade. The posh high-rise that looms above the ocean was supposed to be a six-story residence for war widows. But the project grew to 31 stories and was tainted by allegations of corruption. Both Uttam Khobragade and his daughter were called to testify before a judicial commission investigating wrongdoing, but the panel’s report is sealed, and the state government has rejected its conclusions, without making them public.
“There were flats reserved for the scheduled [lower] castes which we applied for and were allotted one of them,” her father said. “We paid the cost of the flat in full. But now it seems we have been cheated. They are neither giving [us] the flat nor any sign of returning our money.”
Portfolio disclosure
Separately, Devyani Khobragade has a large portfolio of real estate holdings, including three flats and agricultural land in three states. Khobragade said in a financial disclosure document this year that the combined worth of these properties was about $300,000. Two real estate experts who reviewed her filing for The Washington Post said she appeared to be significantly underestimating their total value.
India said this week that it has reassigned Khobragade to a post in the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations, a transfer that would, if approved, allow her full immunity from additional charges. (The U.S. government has said she had only limited immunity in her consular post.) But the fraud case seems far from resolved. The United States has said it will not drop charges against her.
Sari Horwitz and Bill Branigin in Washington and Suhasini Raj in New Delhi contributed to this report.
Who is Devyani Khobragade, the Indian diplomat at the center of the firestorm? - The Washington Post
