Preet Bharara addresses his alleged bias against Indian Americans in his new book

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the South District of New York, who was fired by President Trump, in his just released book, talks about how he was vilified by the Indian-American community and the Indian media, for prosecuting Indian and South Asian American white-collar criminals like Raj Rajaratnam and Rajat Gupta, and a mid-level Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade, which threatened to torpedo U.S.-India relations.

In his much-awaited book titled 'Doing Justice - A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law,' Bharara also slams right-wing conservative Dinesh D’Souza whom he prosecuted for campaign finance violations as someone “known for his extremist, insulting, and evidence-free commentary.” D’Souza, who was pardoned by Trump and his felony expunged from his record, had rejoiced in Bharara’s firing by Trump and continued to frame his prosecution as a vindictive act by Bharara and driven by the latter’s own personal desire to prosecute Indians and Indian Americans.

Bharara said that “at various points over my tenure, depending on who was being prosecuted, SDNY was accused of being antiblack, anti-Latino, anti-Swiss, anti-Chinese, anti-Russian, anti-Italian, and so forth.” But also, he adds, “oddly, anti-Indian,” even though the prosecutions of Indian and South Asian Americans by SDNY was hardly a fraction of its case-load during his tenure.

In a chapter in the book, titled ‘Bollywood,’ Bharara acknowledged, “Even when criticism is colossally stupid, it can still sting. Criticism is hard to take, especially false claims of bias. I thought I had a thick skin before I became U.S. Attorney, but I was not especially self-aware in this regard.”

He argued that “accused parties often grasp at straws in lashing out,” and added, “nowhere did I feel that more than when, from time to time, our office prosecuted people who, like me, were of Indian origin.”

“Screams of ‘witch hunt’ in that context were a bit more awkward and hurtful because the argument had to be that not only was making decisions based on ethnicity but I also was bending over backward to direct agents and prosecutors to investigate people of my own ethnic background.”

Bharara declared, “because of the absence of any other Indian American U.S. Attorney at the time and the relative dearth of Indian American defendants, in the minds of some, it was a spectacle when my office charged someone from South Asia.”

For example, after his office had arrested the Sri Lankan American billionaire hedge fund CEO Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading, even though a number of “white people” had also been arrested along with him, Bharara noted, the Wall Street Journal ran an odd story saying: ‘It seems like a courtroom drama made for Bollywood: The Sri Lankan hedge-fund kingpin being prosecuted by a fellow immigrant, the Indian-born U.S. attorney for Manhattan.’ That would be me.”

Bharara wrote, “never mind that there was overwhelming proof of their guilt; never mind that there was disproportionate membership in hedge funds of highly educated Indian professionals,” a growing chorus had developed “in some of the ethnic press about my self-hating penchant for prosecuting Indian Americans.”

“They included, apart from Rajaratnam, Rajat Gupta, Anil Kumar, Samir Barai, Mathew Martoma,” he noted. Bharara added that “I was asked about the ‘controversy’ at functions,” and that it “irritated me every time.”

“There came a point where career prosecutors would walk into my office and tell me the next round of potential defendants based on confidential informants, wiretaps, or other investigative techniques, and I would breathe a loud and comic sigh of relief if there was not an Indian name.”

Bharara, who was India Abroad’s Person of the Year 2011, recalled in his book of how on one occasion, “I was asked to introduce a speaker at the annual banquet by the newspaper India Abroad at the Pierre hotel in Manhattan. The event was, was always, full of high-profile Indian Americans, including people from the finance world. During the cocktail hour, I endured someone asking with a straight face why my office prosecutes so many South Asians.”

That “someone” who confronted Bharara, India Abroad learned at the time, was longtime Democratic fundraiser Ramesh Kapur.

Bharara wrote about how, “Later, as I rose to speak and looked around the room, I thought to myself, how can I poke fun at this nonsense in front of his large crowd?”

“So, against my better judgement, I went to the podium and began like this: ‘It’s great to be here this evening. I’m Preet Bharara and I’m the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It occurs to me as I look out at all of you and see so many prominent Indian Americans captive in this room, I have something important to say to all of you.’”

Bharara wrote that at this moment, “I paused and then said slowly, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ Laughter. I continued, ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.’ More laughter. ‘You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney—though that seems unlikely in this crowd—one will be provided for you.’”

But Bharara said that some individuals like D’Souza, “known for his extremist, insulting, and evidence-free commentary” had made it “their personal mission to perpetuate this insidious narrative.”

He pointed out that D’Souza had “pled guilty to charges my office brought against him in 2014 for a campaign finance violation,” but despite “admitting to his wrongdoing (and his lawyer concluding on the record that he had ‘no defense’ for his client), D’Souza continued to frame his prosecution as an act driven by my own perverse and personal desire to prosecute Indians and Indian Americans.”

Bharara said that D’Souza “gloated when I was fired and framed me as someone with a personal vendetta toward my own people.”

He noted that “even after being pardoned in 2018 by President Trump, D’Souza continued to maintain the self-hating Indian theory. The self-described ‘scholar’ tweeted, ‘KARMA IS A BITCH DEPT: @PreetBharara wanted to destroy a fellow Indian American to advance his career. Then he got fired @ I got pardoned.’”

Bharara, obviously being facetious, described D’Souza as a “Classy fellow.”

But he wrote that “the bubble of ethnic criticism didn’t end with certain Wall Street prosecutions or the hallucinations of an ethnic propagandist,” and he went on to describe the Khobragade controversy, which he said was “a more serious and sustained crisis.”

Bharara described how in 2013, Khobragade, a mid-level Indian diplomat (she was the Deputy Consul General in the Indian Consulate in New York) was arrested by the State Department “for visa fraud in connection with lies about what she would pay her domestic worker. She had agreed under penalty of perjury and other legal sanctions to pay her Indian domestic worker $9.75 per hour,” but that the evidence “showed that Khobragade paid Sangeeta Richard less than $1.00 an hour and violated a multitude of other fair labor practices in the United States.”

He made clear that “SDNY agreed to prosecute the case, at the State Department’s explicit request.”

Bharara wrote that “it was not the crime of the century but a serious offense nonetheless and a burgeoning problems among the diplomatic corps in the United States,” and argued that “Khobragade was afforded a number of courtesies during the course of her arrest, because of her diplomatic status, but she was strip-searched per regular procedure by the U.S. Marshals Service in the SDNY.”

But he acknowledged, “That could have and should have been avoided, given that no one would have sought pretrial detention.”

Some have interpreted this as a major mea culpa by Bharara and unprecedented by an erstwhile top prosecutor.

In his book Bharara spoke of how “the arrest caused an international incident,” particularly as it was an election year in India, “and the ruling Congress Party was in danger of an electoral bloodbath loss to the Indian nationalist BJP.”

“The BJP, the party of the future prime minister Narendra Modi, shrewdly seized upon this supposed Western insult to Indian sovereignty and caused a crisis for the Congress Party.”

Taking a dig at Khobragade’s father, Bharara said this man “who had his own political ambitions in India, announced a hunger strike, though there was no evidence that he ever sacrificed a single calorie after making his dramatic announcement. Nonetheless the drama was joined.”

He wrote of how then Secretary of State Kerry “was pressured to make the case go away,” and of how “the Indians threatened retaliation against our embassy in New Delhi and suggested taking privileges away from American diplomats.”

Bharara said, “At one point, as the Indian government raged, our largest democratic ally in the world—in its most hostile action—removed security barriers from the outside of the U.S. embassy.”

He said, however, that “I am proud of the case and how we upheld the rule of law. I defended our case loudly,” but that “because I was the U.S. Attorney and I happened to be Indian-born, an avalanche of vitriol and bile came my way. Never mind that the case was initiated and investigated by career law enforcement officials, and I personally became aware of it only the day before the arrest. The Indian government and press decided that the case was brought by me -- an Indian American -- for all manner of nefarious reasons.”

Bharara wrote of how “talk show hosts in India took to calling me a self-loathing Indian who made it a point to go after people from the country of his birth,” although “my colleagues and I found all of it a bit odd, because the alleged victim in the case was also Indian.”

He said that “an Indian official asked on television, ‘Who the hell is Preet Bharara?’” and that he was identified on another program “as the most hated man in that country.”

Bharara said, “The criticism grew more and more intense, which might have not bothered me so much had my parents not been reading every word of it. It upset them greatly. Then came the evening when my daughter overheard a conversation in the living room. She asked me, ‘Daddy, what is an Uncle Tom?’ Because that’s what I was being called by journalists in South Asia. That was not pleasant.”

"Finally, I saw a peculiar line of attack in the foreign press, which was this: in a brazen betrayal of my roots, I had undertaken this case for only one reason to serve my 'white masters.’”

“My white masters. These were, presumably, Eric Holder and Barack Obama," Bharara quipped.