Anxious to get over the diplomatic bad blood of the past month, the United States has promptly distanced itself from the offensive comments of one of its diplomats who was expelled by India in retaliation for the expulsion of Devyani Khobragade.
State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said the diplomat’s reported comments “absolutely do not reflect US Government policy, nor were they made on any official US Government social media account”.
The diplomat Wayne May and his wife Alicia Muller May, also a diplomat at the US embassy in New Delhi, have been accused of making derogatory references to Indian conditions and culture in Facebook posts long before the Devyani controversy erupted.
Amid the raging controversy, bloggers dug up the postings, some of them going back to 2010-11, depicting the couple as “racist American diplomats”. If May bemoaned India’s “unhealthy living conditions”, his wife was severe with her comments about “holy cows” blocking roads.
“I haven’t seen the comments. I’ve seen the reports of them,” Harf told reporters, adding: “Again, I would underscore that these do not in any way represent the US Government position.”
May, the regional security officer at the embassy, is alleged to have played a central role in the case against Khobragade, including the “evacuation” of her maid Sangeeta Richard’s family to the US last month just a couple of days ahead of the Indian diplomat’s arrest in New York.
The US authorities have refused to identify the expelled American diplomat. “Due to privacy considerations, I don’t have anything further to share on who the person is or any other details on them,” Harf said.
Acknowledging that it has been a challenging time for US-India relationship in the wake of the Devyani episode, the spokeswoman said: “We just want to get back to business and we want to put this behind us, and we want both sides to work together to move the relationship forward.”
She expressed the view that the two countries would now take significant steps to “improve our relationship and return it to a more constructive place”.
Indicating that things were beginning to move in that direction, she touched upon a meeting that Acting Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller had with Indian ambassador S. Jaishankar on Monday to discuss bilateral cooperation.
Gottemoeller “stressed that it is critical that both sides refocus our attention on the broad agenda before us”, and “underscored the importance of increasing bilateral cooperation on non-proliferation, defence, and arms control”, Harf said.