In December 2016, Norwegian Child Services Agency, Barnevernet, confiscated the son of an Indian origin family in Oslo. It turned out that the boy’s father was a senior member and one-time head of the overseas affiliate of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. He was personally known to prominent leaders in the BJP and Indian Government. The then Indian Foreign Minister, Mrs Sushma Swaraj immediately took to Twitter to condemn the actions of Barnevernet and within three weeks he was returned to his family. In this way a foreign family whose Government supports them is in a better position to secure the return of their child from Barnevernet than any native Norwegian.

Indian activists immediately took up the cause of this family. I set up a petition in Norway that got over a hundred Norwegian endorsements! This gives a measure of how resented Barnevernet is in Norway by the common people, thought the establishment vigorously defends it for no better reason than that they believe that their vaunted systems can never go wrong. 

This support from abroad was widely covered in the Indian papers, including here.