There is more here than meets the eye. A blog post here http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/11/csir-bitten-by-one... sheds some more light on it. In general, I have little sympathy for either side - one comes across as an imperious bureaucrat who does not know what accountability is and the other someone who assumes that India should be willing to roll over merely because he's returned from the US to fix it. Governments are hard to deal with across the globe.

All is far from wine and roses in India, but I'm not sure I'd use this incident as a litmus test.