Techie charged with felony in US seeks govt help to clear name

The US District Court, Eastern District California, Sacramento, charged Dabi with unlawful flight to avoid confinement after he did not appear in the court for hearing after seeking bail against the house he had bought for nearly half a million dollars.

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Dabi had returned to India with his wife and two children, then aged one and six, never to go back. He had fought the case for nine months before running out of savings.“I wrote to the court authorities but did not hear from them. I was not in hiding and expected to hear from them initially and then thought they were no longer interested in the case. Since, nobody contacted me all these years. I thought it was over,’’ Dabi said.

He said his world “turned upside down’’ after a news agency report from Washington DC about his ‘Wanted’ status was widely covered in the media.

After his return, Dabi worked for an IT firm in Hyderabad for three years, and later as a senior IT consultant under the e-governance project. He was associated with the e-governance project for over four and a half years.The court case took away his job in the US, and the media coverage cost him his present assignment. He admitted he did not tell his Indian employers about the pending court case, and they did not ask or verify.

Recently, Dabi — an engineering graduate from Indore — got in touch with the Indian representative of the FBI, and was told in June that the UFAP warrant against him had been withdrawn. He was then directed to get in touch with the prosecution authorities in Sacramento.

Jobless and unsure of his future, Dabi said he wanted to serve the pending sentence and also appeal against the verdict because his “case had not been argued properly”.

But when he applied for the visa, the US embassy asked him for copies of his passport, the old H1B visa and the court order. He neither had the court order nor the warrants. His requests to get the court docket haven’t succeeded so far.

“I and my family are under intense depression,’’ Dabi wrote in an appeal to the Foreign Secretary, seeking his intervention and “support to provide me fair chance for my right to appeal”. He said he also planned to seek help from External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, MP from Vidisha.

Dabi admitted he had stopped visiting the BJP office to avoid embarrassment to the party. His Facebook account has photographs that show him standing close to senior leaders, including CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan and party’s general secretary (organisation) Arvind Menon.

About the BJP’s view of the controversy surrounding him, Dabi added that the party was “sympathetic” towards him.