‘Having a Servant Is Not a Right’
24th December 2013
Voice of the Crust New York Times trots out one of its Pet Brown People to lay down the Party Line.
AT the heart of the fracas surrounding the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York who promised to pay her housekeeper $9.75 per hour, in compliance with United States labor rules, but instead paid her $3.31 per hour, is India’s dirty secret: One segment of the Indian population routinely exploits another, and the country’s labor laws allow gross mistreatment of domestic workers.
Lesson: Unions vote Democrat more dependably than brown people. Check.
India is furious that the diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, was strip-searched and kept in a cell in New York with criminals. Retaliation from the newly assertive but otherwise bureaucracy-ridden nation was swift. American diplomats were stripped of identity cards granting them diplomatic benefits, and security barriers surrounding the American Embassy in New Delhi were hauled away. A former finance minister suggested that India respond by arresting same-sex partners of American diplomats, since the Indian Supreme Court recently upheld a section of a Colonial-era law that criminalizes homosexuality.
I would find that amusing, certainly, when the Immovable Object of who-are-we-to-judge-their-culture gets in the way of the Irresistable Force of we-like-perverts-therefore-you-must-too and ‘progressive’ heads explode. Oh, that Orwell were alive to see this day….
Notwithstanding legitimate Indian concerns about whether American marshals used correct protocol in the way they treated a diplomat, the truth is that India is party to an exploitative system that needs to be scrutinized.
Too bad that they’re not Muslim, which would deflect all such ‘scrutiny’.
I grew up in a middle-class household in India in the ’80s; my parents were schoolteachers, and our lifestyle was not lavish by any means.
Touch base I-grew-up-working-class: Check.
I received new clothes once a year; I don’t recall ever going to a restaurant; our family couldn’t afford a car, so we used a scooter.
Touch base Economically-disadvantaged: Check.
But we always had a live-in housekeeper who cooked and washed our clothes, while a man came by every other day to sweep and mop the floors.
Touch base criticize-culture-that-substitutes-human-labor-for-automation-because-latter-not-available-as-if-everybody-lived-like-Americans: Check.
Fisking the remainder of this article is left as an exercise for the reader — I have presents to wrap.