Opinion Draw the line
The Saudi Arabian diplomat who faces serious charges cannot be allowed to elude the process of justice.
Caitriona Towers in Gurgaon, where the women were allegedly held hostage. (Source: Express Photo by Manoj Kumar)
As horrific details emerge of the sexual abuse of two Nepali women by a Saudi Arabian diplomat in his Gurgaon apartment, the case has run into the usual suspect — diplomatic immunity. The Haryana police rescued the women from the house on a tip-off, but have been unable to arrest the alleged perpetrator or proceed further in the case. The Indian government’s requests to Saudi Arabia to waive immunity to the diplomat have met with stout refusals, and the Saudi ambassador has issued blanket denials of the diplomat’s involvement in the crime. It would be best if Saudi Arabia relented, particularly as the alleged crime is serious and unrelated to the diplomat’s professional role. But if Saudi Arabia does not budge, New Delhi must not shy away from making difficult diplomatic decisions.
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India should at the very least go ahead and name the diplomat, release his photograph, and declare him persona non grata. The government will naturally want to weigh its actions against the repercussions for its relations with a powerful oil-rich country where three million Indians are currently employed. But if it did nothing and allowed the diplomat to elude the process of justice, it would be letting down not just the two women, but women everywhere, India’s recently amended rape laws, and its own commitments, domestic and international, on combating crimes against women.
It would certainly have been easier for New Delhi to read the red lines to the Saudis, had its own record on using diplomatic immunity not been so far from exemplary. Two years ago, the government used high nationalism and some unseemly jugaad to fly Devyani Khobragade back to India from the United States, where she was facing charges of underpaying a domestic assistant while she was deputy consul-general in New York. In 2011, the Indian government refused to waive immunity for Anil Verma, an Indian diplomat posted in London, whom the police wanted to question on wife-beating charges. More recently, India hurriedly pulled out the Indian high commissioner to New Zealand following allegations that his wife had assaulted their domestic help. The Gurgaon crime, involving trafficking and enslavement of women from a third country, while of a different order, gives India the chance to draw a line under those episodes and set a precedent to which it will be held.
What the shocking incident most underlines, though, is that it is time the international community revisits the 1960s’ Vienna Conventions to redraw the boundaries of immunity. The conventions, deemed necessary to enable diplomats to carry out their roles without obstruction in the host country during the Cold War, should not be misused in the present day as a protective cover for heinous crimes.
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