Norway Officials 'Kidnap' Indian Couple's Children

December 24, 2011 8:23 AM EST

A diplomatic altercation between Norway and India could snowball into something bigger, after officials from the Scandinavian country stonewalled requests from India's foreign ministry to look "sympathetically" into the case of an Indian couple whose children were taken by Norwegian childcare services in May, media reports said.

The Kolkata couple, Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya, who are Non-Resident Indian (NRI) citizens, said Norwegian child protection service Barnevernet took their two-and-a-half-year-old son Abhigyan and four-month-old daughter Aishwarya on May 11.

The Bhattyacharyas, speaking to an Indian daily, said the authorities came up with "bizarre explanations" for their act and the ordeal appeared to them like "child kidnapping in a civilised society".

"They said the mother was incapable of taking care of the children ---- that our daughter looked at the faces of other people around her instead of her mother's was evidence that we were not taking proper care of her, and that our son remained aloof in the kindergarten and banged his head on the floor," the father, Anurup, told The Telegraph.

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"They (asked) me why I was sleeping with the children in the same bed. This is a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them," Anurup, who has lived in Norway for six years, said.

On Nov. 30, a court ruled the two children would be placed in separate foster homes till they were 18, with their parents - who currently live in the city of Stavangers - being permitted to meet them only twice a year for an hour at a time.

In 2005, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern "at the number of children removed from families and put in foster homes in Norway." It said the country must protect the natural family environment and only send children to foster homes as a last resort and in the best interests of the child.

Officials from India's Ministry of External Affairs have said that Oslo has so far cold-shouldered explanations of cultural differences in child-rearing and New Delhi was now taking up the matter diplomatically.