NEW YORK (AP) – U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has made the cover of Time magazine and won praise for tough talk about corruption on Wall Street. But his prosecution of an Indian diplomat has drawn scorn from his birthplace, with one commentator in India even questioning if he took up the case “to serve his white masters.”
For the most part, Bharara has chosen not to speak about the cultural and racial undercurrents that lurk in high-profile cases his office – the country’s largest – has brought against South Asian defendants. That changed at a recent speech at Harvard Law School, where he cited the criticism and countered it with unusual candor.
The so-called white masters are “presumably, Eric Holder and Barack Obama,” Bharara quipped.
But the prosecutor – who said he’s been criticized by the left and the right, by various governments and has been banned from Russia – also conceded that the uninvited scrutiny about the arrest of a mid-level diplomat on charges she underpaid a domestic worker brought pain too. He told the crowd he only personally learned of the case that caused what he described as “an international incident” a day or two before the December arrest. Soon afterward, she was permitted to return to India, though charges remain.
The criticism was like nothing that had ever fallen upon a Manhattan prosecutor. Rudy Giuliani ‘s Italian-American background drew no special attention from Italy as his office arrested scores of defendants in organized crime cases. Giuliani seemed to enjoy the prosecutions, even playing a “Godfather” in an annual press show when he was mayor. Bharara’s treatment got personal.