Diplomat Devyani Khobragade Dresses Up As A Khmer Apsara

NEW DELHI – Devyani Khobragade, the Indian Foreign Service officer who was at the center of a diplomatic row between New Delhi and Washington D.C. little over a decade ago, is now in the middle of another storm.

Despite the bad taste she left the Indian American community with and causing an upset with America, she managed to land back on her feet and is now the Indian ambassador to Cambodia.

She wished the people of the country in a special way – through a photoshoot dressed as a ‘Khmer Apsara’ and posted on the embassy’s official handles.

“Ambassador Devyani Khobragade has a deep admiration for Khmer culture and tradition. Embracing the spirit of Khmer New Year, she elegantly dressed as a Khmer Apsara, embodying the rich bond of our civilizations. Wishing all our Cambodian friends a joyous Khmer New Year celebration,” the post was captioned.

Opposition parties have termed the photoshoot as pathetic and “fancy dress.”  Over 5,000 Indians are currently trapped in Cambodia and kept hostage by traffickers. But what’s the Indian Ambassador there doing? Playing fancy dress by ‘dressing up as an Apsara‘ and doing photo shoots. Is this the value of Indian lives abroad,” asked All India Trinamool Congress MP from Maharashtra Saket Gokhale.

While in New York, Khobragade was arrested on charges of visa fraud and one count of making false statements by the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. She was charged of paying her domestic help below minimum wage in the but was later dismissed by a US court because she had full diplomatic immunity. The row saw a series of diplomatic reprisals by India including downgrading privileges of certain categories of US diplomats in the country and the withdrawal of one American diplomat from the country.

In 2010, Khobragade’s was charged receiving favorable treatment in the allotment of language training by the government during the early years of her diplomatic service. The Supreme Court said that a great amount of political pressure was applied to ensure that she was allotted German as her language preference, as she happened to be the “daughter of a powerful I.A.S. officer in Maharashtra.”

The Khobragades’ name had also cropped up in the infamous Adarsh Society scam which erupted in 2003 and led to the resignation of an ex-Congress chief minister Ashok Chavan, currently a Bharatiya Janata Party Rajya Sabha MP.