US Energy Secretary calls off India visit amid Khobragade row

New York: US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz will no longer travel to India as his planned trip has become the latest casualty of the Devyani Khobragade row which has snowballed into a full-blown spat. MIT physicist Moniz was due in Delhi on 15 January for the bilateral energy dialogue. “I can confirm that Secretary Moniz is no longer traveling to India next week,” an official of the US Energy Department told Reuters on Wednesday. “We have been in conversation with Indian counterparts about the dates, and we have agreed to hold the dialogue in the near future at a mutually convenient date.” [caption id=“attachment_1325401” align=“alignright” width=“380”] Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade. Facebook image[/caption] Firstpost reported on 7 January that the rough America treatment shown Khobragade had created enough bad blood to leave US official visits to New Delhi in limbo. With the diplomatic row stretching into its third week with little sign of resolution, India is in no mood to put out silver flatware and dine US officials at Hyderabad House in New Delhi. The US State Department has been applying pressure on India to host Nisha Desai Biswal, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia. But Biswal’s first visit to India is likely to be delayed till the Ministry of External Affairs sees progress on the Khobragade case. Manhattan Attorney Preet Bharara is intent on sticking to a 13 January deadline to file charges against Khobragade. The diplomat’s lawyers have appealed to the court for a one-month extension, which they say would help facilitate ongoing negotiations to resolve the matter. Bharara has opposed the granting of any extension. U.S State Department and Indian government efforts to resolve the case diplomatically would be made significantly more difficult if Khobragade is indicted on 13 January, and she has clearly pinned her hopes on avoiding that step. A letter filed Tuesday by attorneys for Devyani Khobragade accused federal prosecutors in Manhattan of trying to pressure her into pleading guilty by next week. They renewed a request for an extension of the January 13 deadline for an indictment “to eliminate pressure on the situation and permit efforts which are ongoing resolve this matter.” The letter came in response to a filing on Monday by prosecutors saying there had been “hours of discussion” over a possible plea deal, and that as recently as this weekend, the US government had “outlined reasonable parameters for a plea that could resolve the case, to which the defendant has not responded.” Khobragade’s lawyer Daniel Arshack blasted Bharara’s office for violating an agreement not to discuss the plea negotiations publicly. “We can only think that the violation of that agreement is a distressingly calculated one,” Arshack said India has presented the State Department with a document, dated 26 August, 2013, temporarily accrediting Khobragade to the Indian UN mission as an adviser through the end of December — a date that India argues would have afforded her full immunity at the time of her arrest. Indian lawyers say that if Khobragade was in fact an UN-credentialed ‘Advisor’ to the Permanent Mission of India in September then she had full immunity from arrest last month and can actually sue the US for an unconstitutional false arrest. In what some have described as “gross overreach of judicial authority” by Bharara, Khobragade was handcuffed and arrested in front of her daughter’s school on December 12 and then strip-searched by US Marshals. She was held in a cell before being freed on a $250,000 bail. Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to justify treating a diplomat in a wage dispute like a hardened criminal.