NRI Parents Urge Government To Intervene As Norway Govt Takes Custody Of Their Child

In another such case in last half a decade, Norwegian authorities separated a five-year-old child from his NRI parents after accusing them of beating the child.?

“The Child Welfare Department of Norway took custody of my five-and-a-half-year-old son on December 13, at 9.30 am, from his kindergarten school. They did not give us prior information. At 10 am, the same day, four policemen came to my house, took my wife into custody, and interrogated her from 11.15 am to 2.45 pm," Anil Kumar, father of the child told The Indian Express.

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Kumar, who owns an Indian restaurant and has also served as vice president of the Overseas Friends of the BJP in Oslo, told the daily that the boy has been sent to a children’s welfare home in Hamar which is 150 kms from the capital Oslo.

“When we asked for the reason, it was conveyed to us that we had beaten up our son,” said Kumar, who migrated from Punjab to Norway about 26 years ago.?

He and his wife, Gurvinderjit Kaur, have reached out to BJP leaders in Delhi and sought the government’s intervention.

"They interrogated our child for about one-and-a-half hours. They showed us some of those videos. The video shows that when asked whether his parents have loud discussions with each other and if they beat him up, his answer was no. When they asked him whether his grandfather had beaten him up, he became very angry,” said Kumar.

The Norwegian embassy in Delhi, when contacted, said they were ascertaining the facts from the authorities in Oslo. Meanwhile, BJP leader Vijay Jolly, former convenor of OFBJP, met Norwegian embassy officials on Wednesday and raised the issue.

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This has been the third case in last five years. Earlier in 2011, a three-year-old and a one-year-old were separated from their parents, Sagarika and Anurup Bhattacharya. The then UPA government took up the issue with the Norwegian government. The Norwegian court later allowed the children to be reunited with their parents.

?In December 2012, a court in ?Norway convicted an Indian couple in a child abuse case. Anupama Vallabhaneni was sent to jail for 15 months, and her husband, Chandrasekhar, got an 18-month prison term. The children, 7 and 2 years, were sent to their grandparents in Hyderabad.