NEW YORK: India’s Foreign Office is still brimming with anger over the arrest and treatment of Ms Dewayan Khobragade, its deputy consul general in New York, has adopted innumerable punitive measures that it believes puts American diplomats in India at par with Indian diplomats in the United States, the New York Times reported in a dispatch.

Among the stringent steps taken to avenge the treatment meted out to Ms Khobragade in New York by US Attorney Preet Bhara as part of the legal process, Indian foreign office has according to the newspaper adopted its own punitive measures which include:

-- Withdrawal of passes that allow American diplomats to meet important guests, like members of Congress, at airport gates, and cancelled the diplomatic identity cards given to consular officials and their families, reissuing cards only to officials. The cards instruct police officers that the holder may be arrested for serious offences.

-- In addition, India is investigating whether spouses and employees of American officials are paying taxes on earnings made in India, particularly at the American schools in New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. India has cancelled the United States Embassy’s import privileges for food and alcohol. And security barriers that surrounded the embassy in New Delhi have been permanently removed. Indian officials say the barriers were unnecessary and in some cases impeded traffic, the NYT said.

“We would not do anything to adversely affect the security of the US Embassy,” Mr Akbaruddin a spokesman of Indian Foreign office said.

“To suggest otherwise is unfair’, the paper quoted him as saying.

There are 14 other Indian maids working for Indian diplomats in the United States, and India is negotiating over their status with the State Department. To India, these maids should be considered Indian government employees whose employment does not fall under American wage and hour laws, the paper said.

A little-noticed aspect of the uproar has been India’s unhappiness with American officials of Indian descent. The federal prosecutor on the case, Preet Bharara, is of Indian descent, as are many officials on the South Asia desk of the United States State Department, NYT said in the report.

India has a fraught relationship with members of its own diaspora.

Commercials and Bollywood films often treat such people with mild contempt, and in the Khobragade case, Indian officials have said they believe that their counterparts in the United States treated India poorly in an excessive show of loyalty to the United States.

American officials, “ quietly say they bent over backward to heal bruised feelings. On Dec 19, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to get in touch with the Indian foreign secretary, Salman Khurshid, but Mr Khurshid did not take his call for reasons he has not explained. So Mr Kerry called Shivshankar Menon, the Indian national security adviser, to express his “regret” over the matter.

Top Indian politicians instead demanded an official apology and a dismissal of all charges against Ms Khobragade. On Dec 20, Mr Khurshid continued to express outrage over the affair and said he expected to hear from Mr Kerry soon. But by then, American eagerness to resolve the impasse had evaporated. That same day, a deputy State Department spokeswoman said

Mr Kerry had not spoken to Mr Khurshid and had no plans to do so.