What is so unreasonable in asking for a child removed from its parents by child services in a foreign country to be repatriated to her extended family in India? Ten years ago, the press exploded with news of the Bhattacharya children who were removed from their parents in Norway. I joined the activists and lawyers here who took up the case. The Indian government intervened, and the children were returned to India in care of their extended family. Their mother, Sagarika Chakraborty, was eventually able to win back their custody. Ten years on, looking at the happy children, there is every reason to question Norway’s actions. Sagarika’s story will shortly be released as a film, Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, with Bollywood star, Rani Mukerjee.
In the decade since Sagarika’s case, every year, I have been contacted by families whose children have been taken by child services abroad. They call me from the USA, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Australia. Most of the families are Indian, but I get calls from other South Asians–from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I give comfort and advice for free to all who call me, but it is high time for the government to have a policy for Indian families in this situation. The trigger for child services cases can be anything from a toddler’s fussiness in playschool to an injury suffered by the child at home. Police are routinely called in when parents take a gravely injured child to hospital. Typically, the police case is closed without prosecution. This is because the dramatic claims of the child services are almost always speculative, with very little hard evidence that would stand up in a criminal trial.
But child services are not bound by the burden of proof that applies in other areas of the law. They are not even required to make specific allegations. The child’s injury or perceived behavioural problems are sufficient for them to press for permanent removal from the parents.
In this way, the deck is stacked against the parents. Things are even worse when the parents are newly arrived immigrants. Typically they are from lower middle class backgrounds. They are bewildered at being accused of harming their own children. They have little knowledge of the local language, no social network and can scarce afford top-notch lawyers.
The children are placed in foster care with the prospect of either remaining there till adulthood or being adopted to strangers, even where they have living family back in India willing, nay begging, to be permitted to have them.
Once in foster care, the children are allowed little or no contact with their parents. Contact with the extended family in India is not even considered. Siblings, even twins, can be separated. The child does not have a soul in the foreign country to call her own. Such a child finds herself all the more alone if she is from a different ethnicity and culture to the foster carer’s.
There is no reason for Indian children to be left to this bleak existence in a foreign country when a happier alternative is available for them with extended family in India.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) says that when a child is removed from parental custody, its identity, nationality, language and religion should be preserved. The UNCRC also recognises the need of a child to be raised in a family environment.
To refuse a child any chance to be raised in the community of its birth amounts to erasing the child’s identity and preventing her from living among her own people. These are very serious violations of the personhood of the child.
For all these reasons, it is both immoral and illegal for Western countries to have a “finders-keepers” approach to foreign children removed from their parents. India is in a good position to rally other nations behind this cause. All South Asian nations have large expatriate communities in developed countries. If the frantic calls to me over the last decade are any indication, their expatriates too face the same difficulties with child services.
India’s highly publicised intervention in the Norway case made a big impression on victims, activists, lawyers, academics and journalists the world over who have been carrying on their own campaigns for justice from child services agencies. There is a lot of goodwill for India on this issue among people of all nationalities. When the child of the head of the Overseas Friends of BJP chapter in Oslo was confiscated by child services a few years back, I was able to get a petition condemning this signed by 100 Norwegians—all natives!
Africans and Eastern Europeans abroad have also been facing the brunt of overzealous and racist Western child services. The issue is ripe for consideration on the global stage as a humanitarian problem affecting many nations. All that is required is for a large and democratic country like India to take an interest in articulating the cause and organising international support for it.
In late May this year, the Minister for External Affairs, Dr S. Jaishankar, said that this government’s foreign policy has “the people at its centre” and a diplomacy for our “civilisation”. What could be more civilisational and people-centric than Mother India rising up to bring back her children?