Fleeing maids nothing new for Indian diplomats in US

[prasad1]

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A day before Ambassador Meera Shankar was to return home after completing her tenure in the US in the summer of 2011, her maid, without informing anyone, left her official residence on the outskirts of the city never to return.


The highly-secretive Indian Embassy in Washington hushed up the matter from the media and is believed to have registered a formal complaint with police and the State Department, in addition to cancelling the maid's official passport. The woman domestic worker, who served the Ambassador quite well during her tenure of more than two years in Washington, is still untraceable and believed to be living illegally in the US. And she is not the only Indian maid - officially called "India-Based Domestic Assistant" - to have fled from the homes of senior Indian diplomats in the past few years. Sources familiar with such incidents said, strictly on condition of anonymity, that the number of such maids or India-Based Domestic Assistants (IBDAs) from the Indian Embassy in Washington – one of the largest Indian diplomatic missions - could be at least a dozen in the past decade.


Not only maids, but security guards brought from India too are believed to have fled, mostly towards the end of their tenure.

 

[prasad1]

It is no secret that many Indians go to the US and try to stay on by hook or crook. Thousands of Sikhs have managed to obtain political asylum by alleging that they are being persecuted in India and thus getting full resident- status. Privately, many of them admit that they only took the asylum route as it was the only way they could get a Green Card. However, the US authorities continue to give asylum visas to many Sikh applicants, blindly ignoring the fact that the Sikhs are a thriving community in India, and that our Prime Minister is himself a Sikh.
This is where the TVPA has opened the doors to people like Sangeeta Richard, who can obtain official passports as domestic assistants of our diplomats, get an A3 visa from the US Embassy, reach US shores, work there for some months, abscond and then obtain a T Visa. The visa fraud allegedly committed by Devyani Khobragade was in fact committed by Sangeeta Richard as she misrepresented her terms of employment to the US Embassy during her interview with the Consular officer to get an A3 domestic worker visa which would later enable her to leapfrog to a trafficking T Visa.


Now, a few words about two earlier cases which took place in New York. Shanti Gurung worked as a housekeeper for Dr Neena Malhotra, Consul for over three years.


I met her often as she would come to the consulate to attend functions such as Republic Day, Independence Day, Diwali, Baisakhi etc, as well as music concerts, and she was always happy and contented. I was shocked when she went missing on the eve of Dr Neena’s departure from New York on transfer and even more shocked when she filed a lawsuit a year later against her employer alleging confinement, forced labour, slavery, ill treatment etc. No doubt, she did so to obtain a T Visa.

How Indian envoys to the US can fall victim to maids

 

[shastibrata]

"The visa fraud allegedly committed by Devyani Khobragade was in fact committed by Sangeeta Richard as she misrepresented her terms of employment to the US Embassy during her interview with the Consular officer"

How could this be when the corroborating information was supplied by Dr.Khobragade? When the GOI knows that many of its employees are bailing out on them, it behooves it to take measures to prevent this from happening. The steps could range from making them government employees, hiring personnel locally, or outright telling its diplomats that they have to meed the host country's local laws if they take domestic assistants along with them. It is a matter of national pride and the Government has to do right by the nations interest rather than the selfish interest of the diplomats.

Going by how corrupt these civil service personnel have become of late and the unholy nexus that seems to exist between them and the politicians, it will not surprise me if it was by design that these domestic assistants flee once they reach the shores of the West.