Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light
Some weeks ago, a friend returned from the ladies' room in a Delhi mall looking perturbed. I asked her what the matter was. She reported that she had praised the attendant for keeping the lavatory spotless. In reply, the attendant, visibly moved, said she had worked in the public toilets for years and never been thanked. This distressing incident came back to me after reading Preet Bharara's statement a couple of days ago when he asked, "One wonders why there is so much outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian national accused of perpetrating these acts, but precious little outrage about the alleged treatment of the Indian victim and her spouse?"
Whatever the facts of the case - and by this point there has been so much misinformation on all sides of the controversy we will never know for sure - it is hard to dispute that in the feeding frenzy that 24/7 television unleashes there have been few reporters who have contacted the law firm, Safe Horizons, acting for Sangeeta Richard or her in-laws to get her side of the story. Instead, I have heard of reporters wondering whether this is a "CIA plot" or alternatively that the US actively solicits immigration from Christians - hence the favouritism shown towards her. Having spent most of my working life overseas, I know that Indians working as servants in the US, UK and Hong Kong regularly take their employers to court over under-payment of wages. These are legitimate grievances in many cases, but these are sometimes also a strategy to extract money from employers who did not fulfill the legal obligations expected in these jurisdictions because they had a prior understanding with the servant in India or were trying to help out a fellow immigrant. I have no idea into which of these categories Sangeeta Richard falls, but very few people do as we have not heard her side of the story.
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So, cases of under-payment of Indian staff come up often, including more than a few times in the US with the servants of Indian diplomats there. Lost in all the abuse being hurled at the US - including comically enough by a Communist students' union who had to be pushed back from the consulate in Hyderabad this week - is that the "scaffold supporting" life in India is changing. Our servants are aspirational too. They are better informed and better educated than ever. This is nowhere truer than of the Indian servants working overseas. In the latest twist in this bizarre, ever-changing saga of how Khobragade's salary was "inadvertently" entered on the forms as Richard's, Uttam Khobragade alleged on Thursday that "Sangeeta used Devyani's computer to fill out the application form." Why was a document going to the US government not vetted by consular staff, including by his daughter?
To ensure that we do not have a repeat of this damaging episode, it is time that the Indian foreign service changed its practices for taking servants overseas. The government must pay them the prevailing hourly wage excluding travel, living and food costs as explicitly insisted upon by US and, indeed, authorities in my former hometown, Hong Kong, which has hundreds of thousands of maids from Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and elsewhere working there. Or our diplomats must be given larger entertainment budgets to hire catering services for official functions - and asked to do without live-in help. For those diplomats anxious about having to learn to cook for themselves, I can recommend Madhur Jaffrey's introduction to Indian cooking, which has sold more than a million copies, but all too few I would wager to members of our diplomatic staff.
As for the rest of us heaving with perhaps understandable indignation at the treatment of a diplomat by the US marshals, we must also examine the way we treat servants at home. Do they work closer to a 90 hour week than a 40 hour week as the US laws require? In Mumbai and Bangalore, our help have choices and full-time help is harder to find. If the manufacturing sector ever assumes anything like the size it should be in an economy like India's, servants will be harder to find. But this is to put too utilitarian an aspect to this argument. One of the missing values in India's DNA - decades after Mahatma Gandhi took up its cause - is a respect for the dignity of labour. If this country is to be the democracy our founding fathers intended, our national honour depends not on declining to take calls from a US secretary of state, but on treating people who serve us better. We could start by thanking them more often.