The Right to Reject Parenthood

A Norwegian egg on SM Krishna’s face shows how India looks at child rights

On a news channel this Tuesday, a former diplomat railed against the media for having made the External Affairs Ministry take a special interest in the case of the Indian expat couple whose children were forcibly put in a foster home by the Norwegian government. He said that the External Affairs Ministry would have otherwise used normal channels to sort out the issue. Instead SM Krishna, India’s Foreign Minister, spoke to the parents on national TV and promised to return the children.

It now turns out that the parents—Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya—lied about it being an arbitrary decision by the Norwegian government. According to Anurup, the wife has psychiatric problems, used to beat him up, and the children were terrified of her. He is going for a divorce. The media’s response is predictable: if Norway is not the villain, then it must be the couple.

The couple’s actions were in fact understandable. A crisis took precedence over other issues, and to get the children back, what else could they do? Embassies don’t care too much for ordinary Indians. Look at Indians languishing in Middle Eastern jails. But it still leaves the question why India swallowed the story without a thought. It is because we cannot comprehend a society where in the absence of responsible parenting, the right to parenthood can be revoked. If there was a national census on children abused in their homes and if everyone spoke the truth, half of all Indian children would have to be put into the foster homes of the other half. But they continue to be there getting abused.

At the time, Krishna glossed over the Norwegian action as ‘cultural differences’. It is not. It is the difference between progressive and medieval societies. In India, the State cannot imagine protecting a child from an emotionally damaging home environment. That is a personal hell—let the families deal with it. It was exactly this compromise that the ministry, which must have known more about the actual facts of this case than the media, accepted—let the uncle take the children and later on when the Norwegian state cannot do anything, transfer them to the parents again.