The diplomatic pat-down

Last week the Indian foreign service was in the news for three consecutive days when a female searcher at Homeland Security at Jackson Mississippi airport patted down Mrs Meera Shankar, India’s ambassador to the United States, before she boarded her return flight to Washington. Readers who get a kick out of reading stories of the misfortunes that occasionally befall foreign celebrities will recall that it wasn’t so long ago when Mr Shah Rukh Khan, India’s matinee idol, did his striptease for the lads at Kennedy Airport. The men from the ministry didn’t bat an eyelid, but then Mr Khan isn’t a diplomat, just an actor. Mrs Shankar was visibly upset and rightly so, and believed she had been singled out because she wore a sari. The incident predictably ruffled quite a few feathers in New Delhi and the Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna was naturally quite upset. Officially he said: “This is totally unacceptable to us. She is an ambassador and we are going to take up the matter with the US government.” One is not privy to the comments he made privately to his assistant, but they must have been convolutedly portentous.

However, in spite of what appears to be an obvious case of careless handling, all that the officials of the Department of Homeland Security were doing was ensuring that every passenger in addition to undergoing electronic surveillance submits to a body search and this includes diplomats. This meant that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant with the freckles, blonde hair and a russet face, clutching a copy of the biography of James Earl Carter, who happened to be in the same queue as Mrs Shankar, also got a pat-down like everybody else. Of course, if one reads the small print, the guidelines allow for discretion on the part of Transportation Security Administration officers, who on this occasion chose not to oblige. This writer’s sympathies are entirely with Mrs Shankar, not just because she said she was a diplomat and her passport endorsed the fact, but also because she felt a sense of pride in wearing her national dress which is arguably the world’s most elegant and graceful attire for women.

Security searches at airports are for the benefit of the passengers and not the staff, and are conducted to ensure maximum possible security, though, at times, one balks at having to remove one’s belts, shoes and a number of other accessories that might contain metal, when the staff jolly well knows that these days explosives also come encased in plastic. On the whole, the inspections are an unmitigated nuisance. Well … except for that one time, 34 years and eight months ago at Stockholm airport, when a rather attractive female security officer was involved in the frisking.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2010.