Reflections on the Khobragade Affair

As the Khobragade affair recedes from the headlines Indians and Americans, especially those outraged by the actions of the other side, need to engage in crisis-level introspection on the moral-political landscape we occupy.

This is necessary because in both India and the United States we are in great danger of losing the national narratives that make us unique carriers of the human future. 

INDIA

In an atmosphere dank with unscrupulous greed, the Indian power elite seem to have forgotten the lesson of thousands of years of experience: that Truth is the only safe guide in life, that the sole pursuit of material gain can only direct us into ever more delusive and treacherous terrain. The general corruption brought on by that amnesia has seeped into every institution.

The Khobragade affair shows the insidious result.

How could a bright beautiful person like Devyani Khobragade, in the highest quality national service we have, even dream of actions that could bring the accusations the Americans leveled against her? This is not a matter of legal guilt or innocence. Where was her sense of honor?

Honor is a deeply personal matter but it is also of profound national importance. India cannot defend and promote the precious freedom won by the sacrifice of many generations if our elite are without honor. If the private conduct of top politicians and bureaucrats exposes them to blackmail or if they are greedy enough to betray their country for profit, we will not be able to escape Britain’s economic vampires and all our hopes of a fair and just society will be castles in the air.

Honest people considering this situation should know they have the power to change it. The moral tone of our national life reflects the fact that in every institution at every level honest people have responded to the corruption of colleagues by lowering their eyes, choosing not to confront evil because it would disrupt their lives. This is the primary reason why the level of malfeasance is so high in the country. If honest people put their foot down, if the corrupt know their own co-workers will hold them to account we would not need Lokyuktas and prolonged court proceedings to fix guilt or clean out the scum.

UNITED STATES

In the United States, the Khobragade affair should focus introspection on why law officers pursued a working mother with such fierce zeal while filing not a single criminal charge against anyone at HSBC or Standard Chartered for massive, serious and multi-year violation of American law.

For exaggerating the income of a maid and making her work long hours for low pay, the US Attorney in New York leveled multiple criminal charges against an Indian diplomat who had full immunity.

For allowing $16 trillion (yes, trillion) in bank transfers that included a great deal of money from Latin American drug lords, HSBC was fined. Standard Chartered deliberately ignored American sanctions on Iran to process payments that certainly included funding for terrorists. It too was fined.

In contrast to the public and egregious humiliation of a Dalit woman on an Indian salary that is a pittance by American standards, the White multimillionaires at the British banks got discreet kid glove treatment.

This disproportion is no small thing.

It points to how far the American social and polite elite have taken their society from its place at the forefront of the democratic and egalitarian revolutions in human affairs. The wealthy curled darlings at HSBC and Standard Chartered were just too powerful to be treated equally before the law.

INDO-AMERICAN RELATIONS

The Khobragade affair has done serious harm to Indo-American relations.

On the Indian side, there is incomprehension of how senior American officials could meet with their Indian counterparts the day before the arrest and not say a word. That has rekindled Cold War era distrust of official America.

In the absence of any explanation or apology, distrust will not be the only lasting element in future Indian responses to the United States. There will be a justified perception that Washington regards India with a degree of self-righteous arrogance that verges on contempt.

Britain & Hinduism 8: Breaking Bad

In 1972, a British national of Pakistani origin, Agha Hasan Abedi, founded what he called a “Third World bank” in London. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) became a runaway success, expanding from 19 to 108 branches in three years and its assets jumping from $200 million to $1.6 billion. In less than two decades, it had $23 billion in assets and was operating in 73 countries, with offshoots in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman. It became the first foreign bank to open an office in China.

Through its Third World Foundation BCCI handed out awards to luminaries like Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (with Indira Gandhi making the presentation). As the bank’s senior staff hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers and the governments of many developing countries gave it their official business, tens of thousands of small depositors in developing countries trusted it with their life savings.

What only a few people knew was that BCCI also held the accounts of Abu Nidal the terrorist, members of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia, and Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, who had set up hundreds of heroin processing plants close to the Afghan border and trucked their output to Karachi in military vehicles.

Laugh Out Loud Television News

Indian television provides many laugh out loud moments.  

Headlines Today could easily be repackaged as a News version of Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily!" (In case readers don't remember, that dates back to the time when Chinese films were a novelty and Allen, then still funny, provided his own riotous subtitles to one.)

Any interview by Prannoy Roy, especially on foreign affairs or economics, is usually rich in laughs. His most recent outing, on the US election, did not disappoint for its premise was that the world's most disciplined under control democracy is on the verge of becoming "ungovernable." He seems to have fallen for the "deeply divided electorate" line that US television anchors resort to when voting patterns get too mind-numbingly predictable.
 
Arvind Kejriwal's Press Conference on HSBC bank accounts was comic in a refreshingly new way. It showed broadcasters in the role of Wily Coyote who in his heyday was always running off cliffs and remaining airborne until he looked down and saw there was no ground under his feet.

Anticipation was high before the show, with excited reporters speculating on what was about to be revealed. Once it began, there was an almost visible deflation. Moments after Mukesh Ambani's name was mentioned as one of the account holders Headlines Today began noting it as a "faux pas" by Kejriwal: a crawler said HSBC had apologized to the Mumbai billionaire. Another noted that his account had "zero balance."

Kejriwal evidently realized he was not on a good wicket right away and a look of gloom settled in under the high cap. He was quite clearly completely at sea about the information he was divulging, and seemed to think the HSBC accounts are all hawala arrangements. Most are probably the proceeds of trade mispricing.

Luckily for him, there were few questions. The journalists present exhibited no curiosity at all about any aspect of the revelations.

In contrast to Indian television, the BBC provides few occasions for laughter.

Only a grammarian would crack a smile at the shop-girlish exchanges of "Thank you very much indeeds!" by anchors who seem not to know the uses of an adverb. (I live in dread of the day one of them will sing out "Hello Indeed!")

So, while we are on the subject of HSBC, it is probably appropriate to mention that the BBC's coverage of the bank's black accounts story -- back when it broke this summer -- had one laugh out loud moment.

The story this summer was that investigators in New York had found HSBC routinely laundering drug/terrorist money and were threatening to take away its license. (They seem to have settled for a billion dollar fine.)

The humor came from one of BBC's inimitably fustian financial analysts who waved away the concerns about British ethics expressed by Business News editor Sally Bundock. HSBC's long-running criminality he said, was an "amazing lapse of concentration."

Anyone who thinks he was being droll should read the testimony of HSBC officials before a United States Senate subcommittee last July. Every single one of them took the line that the money laundering was the result of managerial oversight. Now that the Americans had brought it to their attention, things would change, by God!