Mani Shankar Aiyar, a retired senior diplomat and several time Member of Parliament responded in the India Express on March 18, 2023 to Norwegian Ambassador Hans Jacob Frydenlund’s article against the film, Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, in the same paper the previous week. It must be stated in fairness here that Mani Shankar Aiyar is the father of Suranya Aiyar who runs this website and was a vocal activist on this whole issue. He wrote another article on this case and calling for the Ministry of External Affairs to be more pro-active n helping Indian families in this situation abroad in The Week under the title ‘The Three Women Who Helped Mrs Chatterjee‘.
The articles in the Indian Express and The Week are produced below.
“Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway”: A rebuttal to the Ambassador
Mani Shankar Aiyar (for Indian Express)
The Norwegian Ambassador has responded to the Rani Mukherjee starrer, Mrs. Chatterjee vs. Norway, with a very sober attempt to put the record straight. But, begging His Excellency’s pardon, the film is not a generalized attack on his country but deals with a specific real-life case of an Indian immigrant’s infants being abducted by the Norwegian child protection services from the mother on trivial grounds. The story then goes on to recount how, with the intervention of the Indian foreign minister and the efforts of an Indian lawyer, the children were restored to the mother and how they are now around ten years old, brought up by the mother, happy and normal. This is a case study of how the best of intentions can go wrong if entrusted to a bureaucracy with excessive powers unchecked by other organs of state. That the India case study illustrates what is wrong with the Norwegian child protection services, in particular, and western child protection services, in general, are, outside of the film in real life, testified to by the fact that numerous deprived Indian parents and parents of east European immigrants in all parts of western Europe and, indeed, in Norway itself, and across the Atlantic Ocean in the United States, have been turning to the Indian lawyer for help which she extends pro bono. In consequence, the Nordic Human Rights Council have created her a Laureate. In the events that follow the screening of the film, affected persons of Norwegian and other foreign origin have gathered in New Delhi for a seminar at the IIC on 18 March and a dastangoi directed by Mehmood Farooqui next day.
While the film is about a specific case, it points to the systemic deficiencies that need urgent rectification. Where the Norwegian ambassador goes wrong is in claiming “factual inaccuracies” that he does not elaborate. Instead, the facts on which the film is based are conveniently ducked with the argument that the case “was resolved a decade ago in cooperation with the Indian authorities”. What the Ambassador does not mention is that the Indian authorities intervened only after the matter was taken up by an Indian MP (Brinda Karat) and the Indian lawyer. There is no other intervention on record to suggest that such intervention is standard practice for the Indian foreign office. Thus, the film’s message is directed as much at the Indian authorities as the Norwegian. With the growing millions of NRIs, there is need for legislation in India that would compel intervention by the Indian government with child protection services in the West who routinely take away Indian infants on flimsy pretexts. The issue also includes cultural practices of east European children and their families, and, perhaps more numerous, Norwegian children, as high-lighted by the presence at the New Delhi events of a Norwegian father who was deprived of his child by a second marriage despite his four elder adult boys by his first wife testifying to the father’s redeeming qualities.
The Ambassador says he has “beautiful memories of the time my children were growing up”. That included “feeding them with my hands”. He was lucky he did not suffer the surveillance of the English social worker in Stavanger, Norway, who told Sagarika, the Indian mother, that Indians were “barbarians” who “ran around naked” until the British civilized them, and that she knew how Indian families treated their children as she had seen Slumdog Millionaire! Despite clear evidence that the case worker was quite untrained and unfit for the sensitive tasks given to her, the Norwegian child welfare institutions ranging up to and including the judiciary stood four-square behind her. It was only intervention at the level of the Indian foreign minister that enabled the children to be repatriated to the extended family in India. The Indian lawyer then arranged through the Indian judiciary for the infants to be reunited with the Indian mother. And the proof that the Indian judiciary scored over the Norwegian judiciary is that ten years later the children are living with their mother in obvious contentment and happiness. If Norway will not accept the wider dimensions of this case and look into the implementation on the ground of its laws on child protection, these wider implications will have to be stressed and repeated in the interest of not only immigrant families but of Norwegian parents themselves.
This is especially because scientific social studies in Norway and other western countries have established conclusively that children in foster care suffer psychological issues on a scale far larger than is the case of children brought up by their families. I suggest the Ambassador draw the attention of his authorities to these studies as he is quite right in asserting that “a mother’s love in Norway is no different from a mother’s love in India”. That is the precise reason why it is as much in the interests of Norwegian parents as of Non-Resident Indian parents to look into the evident flaws in the implementation of child protection laws and the laws themselves. It is not constructive to indulge in the hyperbole that the film will make Indians think of Norwegians as “cold-blooded tyrants”. A little introspection would be in order of the dire humanitarian consequences of misplaced confidence in the present system. The ambassador claims that “neither the Ministry nor the Minster can intervene in a case” – but that is precisely what they did in the Sagarika Bhattacharjee case – with the most beneficial consequences for India and Norway. The fact is that, as the Ambassador admits, “the experience was traumatic” but describes the film as “fictional representation” when, in fact, it is based on an autobiography penned by the mother who underwent the traumatic experience.
We need an honest dialogue with western powers on this burning human rights issue, not self-serving defences of the “official Norwegian perspective”. Or take back the Laureate awarded to the Indian lawyer.
Disclosure: The Indian lawyer is my daughter, Suranya Aiyar.
MANI-FESTO by Mani Shankar Aiyar (for The Week)
The Rani Mukherjee starrer, “Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway”, was released throughout India and world-wide on 17 March. In Norway itself, tickets were sold out four days running. This shows that the issues raised by the film are not of concern only to India but also to Norwegian citizens who suffer the heavy hand of the Barnevernet, the Norwegian Child Protection Service (CPS) that has been empowered by a draconian law to protect child rights but, on the ground, acts without adequate institutional checks or balances, thus causing needless and sometimes endless suffering to Norwegian and immigrant parents who are deprived of their infants and children without any discoverable reason. Reasons are not discoverable because the right to privacy of the abducted child is heavily protected in the law itself, leaving the victim parents often quite bewildered as to why their children are being taken from them. While CPS if free to enter what evidence it wishes in Norwegian courts of law, defendants are simply not allowed to examine much of this “evidence” kept under wraps. Inevitably, the judge is obliged to list in the direction of the prosecution. And there is virtually no recourse to the executive because, it is claimed, the Norwegian system does not permit intervention by any Ministry or Minister. This confers such arbitrary powers of immunity and impunity on CPS that the moot question is whether in protecting the child’s right to privacy the human rights of the deprived parent and the child are not being brutally violated.
The film is based on the real-life story of a young Indian woman, Sagarika Chakraborty Bhattacharjee, whose infants were snatched from her. Among the allegations made against her was the accusation that she fed her children with her hand; that she smeared her daughter’s forehead; that the kids slept in the same bed as the parents. The social worker assigned to them was a young English woman, who mocked Sagarika that Indians were “running around naked” until the British “civilized” them, and that she knew how Indian parents brought up their children because she had seen Slumdog Millionaire! Sagarika was also charged with mental illness and instability for having fiercely resisted the attempt to take away her children. Besides, foster parents are so handsomely compensated that exploitation of child protection laws for pecuniary gain is an ever-present threat.
While the children were eventually repatriated to India through the intervention of Indian foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, at the instance of Brinda Karat, the fiery CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP at the time, it was only the dogged persistence of a pro bono Indian lawyer, my daughter Suranya Aiyar, that eventually reunited Sagarika with her children. They are both growing up happy and normal in the loving care of their mother who has had the grit to train herself in software engineering and give her children a good living by working in a multi-national company. The current state of the mother and children is the best proof that in stealing away her infants the Barnevernet had gravely erred. It also showed that if the Norwegian government puts its mind to it , successful executive intervention is possible, whatever the theology of the law.
What lesson does all this hold for India? Only one. That with millions of NRIs travelling abroad and facing the rigours of child protection laws in all of the western world, MEA must become pro-active in helping Indian parents deal with such cases that are rife in the western world. To this end, perhaps a law needs to be enacted by the Indian parliament to secure a binding commitment from the government to do so through its diplomatic and consular offices abroad.
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Mani Shankar Aiyar’s response was reported elsewhere in the press. See below.