It is a telling comment on the times we live in that media circles surrounding the so called sex slave at the Indian embassy in Paris have completely overlooked the implications of last week?s events on the teenage girl at the centre of it all, Lalita Oraon. Nor has much attention been paid to the situation in which Oraon?s employer, the Indian diplomat Amrit Lugun, finds himself: irrespective of whether Lugun is guilty or not, his career in the Indian Foreign Service is as good as finished. Indians are very fond of conspiracy theories and, therefore, it is only with some hesitation that suggestions of any grand plot behind the ?sex slave scandal? can be made. But the question cannot be ignored: who benefits from even a minor row between India and France at a time their relationship is being described as an emerging mirror image of the close ties between India and the Soviet Union in the Seventies and Eighties? But to go back to the question of the helpless Bihari tribal girl?s fate in a foreign land, while reams of newsprint have been used up in debating who mutilated her and when, no one has yet asked the fundamental question of why her rights have been violated repeatedly since the scandal came into the open over a fortnight ago. The first page of every passport issued to Indian citizens requires ?in the name of the president of India? that all those whom it may concern should afford holders of these passports ?every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need?. The Indian girl who was working for the Lugun household was not a holder of an ordinary Indian passport. By virtue of her employment, she had an official passport, a white travel document which gave her a status more exalted than other Indian citizens travelling abroad for business or pleasure. Yet her rights, for which the president of the republic has stood guarantee, have been violated. She has been repeatedly denied consular access, although some may deviously argue that, under the circumstances, it is for Oraon?s own good. She has been paraded like a circus animal on French television and extensively featured in the print media in France. Given the feudal nature of Indian society, it is unlikely that she will get any decent employment in the normal course when she returns home. Most prospective employers will see her as a source of trouble and keep their hands off her. Why did all this happen? Simply because the Indian embassy in Paris, irrespective of the merits of the case, did not appear to the French public to be an honest broker. Considering that events were moving too fast in the Oraon case and since Lugun, the defendant, was one of them at the mission, it may have been difficult for the embassy to take a view of the case that did not appear partisan. But clearly, the embassy?s denials did not carry conviction. As a result, the mission was also unable to help the vulnerable Indian girl in any way, which should have been its duty in the first place. It is here that South Block ought to have come in. The response of the ministry of external affairs to the crisis was to send an official from its administration division to inquire into the scandal. But in the national interest, what was more important than a court martial was an all out effort to limit the damage. At a meeting with an Indian embassy official, the chief of protocol of the French foreign office is said to have suggested that the mission quietly pay Oraon 25,000 French francs and end the matter. The politically correct in India would cite this as yet another example of how the French have cynically manipulated international affairs to suit their interests. But that is what foreign offices are for: not to mouth pious slogans and chant homilies the way South Block has done during decades of Nehruvian obsessions. Two weeks after the scandal came into the open, Lugun?s guilt or innocence, as the case may be, is in doubt. A huge question mark hangs over Oraon?s future. Questions are being asked about the Committee Against Modern Slavery Oraon?s benefactor in distress, known by its French acronym, CCEM. What is not beyond any shadow of doubt, though, is that South Block?s bureaucratic leadership completely failed to rise to the occasion and prevent the crisis in Paris from getting out of hand. Instead of jetting around the world on questionable missions, the foreign secretary, who directly handles France, should have stayed put in New Delhi and given the embassy in Paris some sound advice on defusing the crisis. That was what leadership demanded, but sadly failed to deliver. It is the foreign secretary ? and not the political leadership of the MEA? who knows, for instance, that the wife of the Indian ambassador in Paris is French. Caught up in the media hurricane over Oraon, the embassy may have been handicapped in generating new or unconventional ideas. Therefore, it was the foreign secretary?s office which should have told the envoy in Paris that this was a case where the spouse was called upon to play an active diplomatic role. Many years ago, when demonstrations to protest the alleged Indian discrimination against Sikhs and supporting Khalistan were regular events in Pakistan, the then Indian consul general in Karachi thought of an unconventional way of dealing with the demonstrations. His wife was Sikh and whenever the demonstrators turned up at the consulate to present their memoranda, he would send out his wife, also an IFS officer, to meet the protesters. The idea of an Indian Sikh woman confronting those who were ostensibly demonstrating for the Sikhs took the wind out of their sails and eventually these protests in front of the consulate lost their momentum. Similarly, in the Oraon case, the very idea of a French woman from the Indian embassy being at the maid?s bedside and tending to her in distress would have knocked the bottom out of the case that the salacious French media were building, depicting the Indian embassy as a house of horror. But that was not all that was required. The Indian bureaucratic machine being slow and the country being caught up in election paralysis, the initiative should have come from the foreign secretary to rush a team from the national commission for women or the national human rights commission to Paris. The idea is not to counter the bad publicity alone. The attempt is also to find out the truth through independent agencies. Besides, such assignments provide opportunities for nascent institutions like the NHRC to learn from practical experience the ways of dealing with such crises. In the absence of such initiatives, the impression grew, unfortunately, that the Indian authorities were insensitive and were even guilty of protecting those who had sadistically violated one of their own citizens. India and France may officially put the ?sex slave scandal? behind them. Oraon may eventually go into obscurity and Lugun brought back to some unwanted corner of South Block. But the fallout of the scandal on India and Indians and on French public opinion will be lasting. It is a damage which could have been drastically limited if the foreign secretary had not acted like a quintessential bureaucrat and instead shown some imagination and taken the initiative. It is a lesson his successors would do well to learn from the Oraon episode.