Norway custody case: Shame on all of us!

The  ugly custody battle in Norway should leave us all red faced.Anurup Bhattacharya, the children’s father, is now claiming he did not actually file for separation from his wife as was reported in the Hindu yesterday. But he is not withdrawing his statements about his wife’s psychological problems, that she had attacked him physically, clawing at him and it was not the first time this had happened. Most damning of all he has not withdrawn his admission of the lie that allowed this entire affair to balloon into such a media circus: “If I concealed the seriousness of … our family’s problems, it was because I thought that was the only way we could get our children back. But I now realise that was a mistake and I should have spoken the truth right from the start.”No kidding.Mr Bhattacharya was trying to save his family. Mrs Bhattacharya obviously has mental issues and apparently suffers from depression. They deserve sympathy for that. But that is no excuse for deliberately fanning a media firestorm complete with the grandparents protesting outside the Norwegian Embassy with heartstring-tugging posters of the mother and children.  “How can a mother live on without her children? It is better to die," the grandmother told the media. It created an international furore. The Indian government issued strong demarches and summoned the Norwegian ambassador to express its displeasure.[caption id="attachment_251421" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Mr Bhattacharya was trying to save his family. Screengrab/ibnlive"][/caption]It should be pointed out that no one has spoken to the mother yet. But based on the facts that are currently out there this whole affair was callous, manipulative and fraudulent. Most disturbing, if Mr Bhattacharya truly cared about his family why did he not ensure counseling and treatment and support for his wife in the first place instead of colluding with this charade? Did he expect that if they got the toddlers back, everything would suddenly be hunky dory and his wife’s problems would evaporate?All that comes with 20/20 hindsight. What happens next and how Mr Bhattacharya pays for his deception is between him and the government he duped.But the rest of us should also be cringing. We turned this family’s personal crisis into a matter of national honour. We took umbrage on behalf of the Bhattacharyas. The media whipped us into a frenzy with a narrative about cold-hearted Norwegians ripping a family apart because the toddlers slept with the parents and were fed by hand. We swallowed the story that if the little boy was sitting in the corner of his kindergarten banging his head on the wall it must be because of, as his mother claimed, language issues. Mothers know best. Indian mothers know best of all.It became a story about us, a judgement on us.Politicians across the aisle – Mani Shankar Aiyar, Brinda Karat, Sushma Swaraj – all flayed the Norwegians for daring to teach us about parenting. “How can they impose their laws on our children?” demanded Karat, forgetting that the parents chose to live in Norway and needed to abide by their laws. The government complained about the “insufficient regard paid to the undoubted benefits of bringing up the children in their own ethnic, religious cultural and linguistic milieu while putting them in foster care” carefully ignoring the fact that the foster family was also Indian. Mamata Banerjee made it a point of Bengali pride, and promised all help to the aggrieved grandparents. “The entire country is with them,” thundered Sushma Swaraj. “There is no politics. All parties and citizens are with them.”Yes, we were all a little too much with them. It became about our national pride rather than what it should have been – the very personal story of two small children and one particular family’s tragedy. Continues on the next pageAs Paul Beckett, the Wall Street Journal’s New Delhi bureau chief, dared to point out in his India Real Time blog:

Little mention was made of the fact that the children had been taken away seven months prior and that a Norwegian court in late November, presumably after assessing all the facts at its disposal had ordered that the children be put in foster care until they were 18 with permission to see their parents twice a year. But the story, as stories about perceived slights against Indian-ness abroad inevitably do, took on an overarching black-and-white, or, rather brown-versus-white, quality with scant regard to the possibility that the child protection services may have done the right thing for the kids.

It’s not that the Norwegian child welfare services could not make a mistake or overreact or that cultural misunderstandings cannot arise. Our failure was that we didn’t even give them the benefit of the doubt or, as Beckett points out, look at all the facts out there.  For the media and politicians, it was much easier to ignore inconvenient facts and just cry “Racism."  Outrage comes easy.[caption id="attachment_251423" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Ajay and Krishna Bhattacharya, paternal grandparents of children in New Delhi for a sit-in protest. Naresh Sharma/Firstpost"][/caption]“It’s lofty standards and high moral tone do not necessarily exempt Norway from being a flawed and occasionally racist society,” wrote Sunil Sethi in the Business Standard raising the bogeyman of Anders Breivik and his shooting rampage that killed 70 people last year, as if the fulminations of a clinically insane killer had anything to with this family court case.God knows we are easily offended these days. But it is especially true whenever something like this happens in the diaspora. Whether it’s an Indian diplomat being accused by his maid of treating her like a slave, or a Krittika Biswas being wrongly accused of sending anti-Semitic emails to her teacher, we instantly erupt in self-righteous indignation instead of letting the law take its course and letting all the facts come out.In the end, all this frothing and fuming did no one any good, not the government whose envoy must have known some of the truth but kept mum, the media which fanned the flames without checking all the facts  or the family whose dirty laundry is now being aired all over the news.The Norwegians, on the other hand, kept quiet all through holding fast to their strict confidentiality laws despite the hysterical charges of “kidnapping” being flung at them. Perhaps we could all do well to learn something from their stoic silence.Sometimes the best thing for  everyone is to just shut up and take a deep breath. Especially when there are children involved.