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Rape And Diplomacy In India

By Zeeshan Hyder

17 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

They came from the wrecked homes of Nepal, desperate for money. One was a divorcee, who lived with her two daughters and was the breadwinner of her family working as a laborer in Nepal. Another had lost her house to the catastrophic Earthquake in April this year and had come to Delhi to support her husband, who is fighting with cancer.

Both came to Delhi in search of jobs, rather ‘respectable jobs’ but they had been sent by their recruiting agency to the new employer, Majed Ashoor, a Saudi Arabian, who enjoys a diplomatic status in India.

For some unknown reasons, the Saudi Diplomat took these women to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia for some fifteen days, where the diplomat did not even touched or misbehaved with them. The assault began after they returned to India and since then they had been kept in confinement at the luxury apartments of Ambience Island. They were not allowed to go out of the house. They were beaten up, raped repeatedly, abused, assaulted and threatened by the diplomat’s family and their twenty-five guests visiting the diplomat on various occasions, who would watch porn and play out the acts featured in it. They forced them to have un-natural sex over a period of five months. Their medical reports said that ‘The women had been so grievously tortured that it will take years to recover.”

It is bizarre that the diplomat’s shameless wife was aware of the sexual assault on the two oppressed women. In fact, she was in favor of her husband’s heinous crime and made no attempt to help them instead she used the beat them up.

Dexterous Diplomacy

In its own defense, the Saudi Arabian Embassy has raised the ‘diplomatic immunity’ and issued a statement terming the allegations against the diplomat as “false”.

Under the Vienna Convention 1961, the ‘diplomatic immunity’ cannot be violated unless the country that has posted the diplomat ‘waives it off’. It is possible for the Saudi Arabia to waive off the diplomatic immunity as it can be waived off in special cases, when a diplomat has committed a serious crime such as rape or murder.

Nepal is a close neighbor and a country which gets ‘national treatment’ in India. It is a country where the Indian Nationals does not need a Visa or Passport and vice-versa. The only neighboring country where Prime Minister Modi has visited twice in just first six months of being in his office.

The Government of Nepal is hoping for a sympathetic hearing and prompt action from India. It is high time for India to resurrect the attempts at devising the legal frame work and reinforce the commitment of the security of foreign women in India.

It might take India another few decades to get the two women justice, because the Saudi Arabia is a close strategic colleague of India. It is the largest supplier of crude oil, accounting to one-fifth of its needs and has the bilateral trade of about $1.5 billion. Saudi Arabia, who is conducting aerial bombing on Yemen stops for some hours so that the Indians could evacuate their own nationals during the edgy times.

The scenery of all these grounds puts India into a very tough situation. Therefore, New Delhi has to play some ‘dexterous diplomacy’ to balance the relations between these two countries.

Zeeshan Hyder is a high school student from Srinagar. He can be reached at [email protected]




 

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