Krittika is a victim of US racial outlook

The New Indian ExpressFirst Published : 26 May 2011 10:56:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 27 May 2011 12:55:26 AM IST

The recent wrongful arrest of Krittika Biswas in New York has raised a whole lot of questions. Daughter of a diplomat at the Indian Consulate at Manhattan, she was arrested for “sending obscene e-mails to her teacher”. She underwent physical and mental torture for no fault of hers, as it was established that the e-mails in question were sent by a Chinese student. That she was promptly released does not mitigate the harassment she had to undergo. It will take a long time for her to get over the shock. Biswas is well within her rights to sue the New York city police for the cruelty meted out to her.


Even if the charge against her constituted an offence that warranted police intervention — ideally, it should have been handled by the school authorities themselves — the police should have given due consideration to the fact that she was a diplomat’s daughter. Their argument that diplomatic immunity was available only to the embassy staff, and not to the consulate staff, is unacceptable. In that case, the US consulates in Chennai and Kolkata, for instance, won’t be able to claim such a status. What’s worse, they did not even show the courtesy of informing her parents while taking her away to the police station.

It’s obvious the police had no prima facie evidence against her. It is not the first time that Indian diplomats have suffered at the hands of various wings of the US administration, the pat-down received by Indian Ambassador Meera Shankar in Mississippi being a case in point. If anything, this smacks of racial prejudice against the brown people. The policemen who thoughtlessly arrested a young girl on a baseless charge need to be taken to task, which is possible only if the Government of India takes up her case in right earnest