It’s Norway again. Not so long ago, a West Bengal couple fell foul of the child protection laws in that Nordic country for not giving their child a separate bed to sleep in and for feeding it with their hands. This time, an Andhra Pradesh couple are in the news. Their crime — to have warned their seven-year-old he would be sent back to India if he didn’t stop “bed-wetting” and “urinating in school and on the road”.
Oslo’s court of appeals will hear the case on Monday. If found guilty, the boy’s father can be jailed for up to a year and a half, and the mother for 15 months. In India this would be deemed preposterous. In the final analysis, the place for a child is with parents if they are loving and well-meaning, even if they don’t do everything right, rather than foster parents or a state protection agency.
Once again we are up against laws based on cultural postulates different from our own, and on the premise of Western hyper-individualism. But, as external affairs minister Salman Khurshid noted, this is a case of an individual and the laws of the nation he/she lives in. The government has promised to help and take appropriate steps, but it can’t force Oslo. When foreigners live in Norway, its government must give them proper counselling on its unusual laws.