Roughly six years ago, I worked at a firm with a number of Indian and Pakistani consultants, and I almost took a few of them up on an offer to bring me back a sword or two from their homeland. From what I’ve read in U.S. Security Moves Spur Testiness, I won’t be bringing back any weapons from the area myself:
Seventy-two-year-old Charles Grader knows how to travel the world — he spent 40 years with the State Department. Yet he ended up in a New Delhi prison cell for a week with 66 other men.Dr. Grader came out of retirement to head a major agricultural and irrigation development program in Afghanistan for Chemonics International Inc., a Washington-based consulting firm. In Afghanistan, he bought several thousand dollars worth of antique pistols and muskets to bring back to the U.S. as gifts, and secured the proper paperwork from Afghan authorities certifying that they weren’t some sort of looted museum treasure.
From Afghanistan, Dr. Grader flew to New Delhi on Ariana Afghan Airlines to catch a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, and then on to Boston. Code-sharing from Afghanistan isn’t exactly seamless — it’s nonexistent. So Dr. Grader was instructed by Indian authorities to claim his baggage and go through security.
When the muskets went through the X-ray machine, trouble started. Dr. Grader unwrapped the 150-year-old guns and offered his paperwork. Indian authorities accused him of trying to smuggle guns into the country. He was eventually taken to a police station at 2:30 a.m., and then transferred to Delhi’s notoriously overcrowded Tihar Prisons. Dr. Grader’s cell, shared by accused murders, smugglers and others, had a single bathroom that was little more than a hole in the ground.
Charge d’Affaires Robert O. Blake from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi worked to free him. It took a week, during which Dr. Grader says fellow prisoners “treated me as an older man with a lot of respect.” Then he was released to house arrest at a hotel. After three more weeks and paying lawyers close to $10,000, charges were dropped and he was allowed to leave the country — without the muskets.