Cartoon Denounced as ‘Blatantly Racist,’ ‘Colonial Stereotyping’
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An opinion piece about Prime Minister Narendra Modi (“A clever and slightly annoying man”) in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest daily newspaper, was accompanied by a cartoon that is considered degrading and racist by Indian politicians and citizens.
A leading Norwegian newspaper is now under fire after it published a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a snake charmer.
The incident occurred after Modi’s visit to Norway sparked a debate over India’s press freedom.
The cartoon was published with a commentary piece on the visit by Norwegian ‘Aftenposten’ just hours before the PM landed in Oslo. The headline reads “A clever and slightly annoying man.”
The image depicts Modi as a snake charmer with the fuel station filling pipe as the snake.
The accompanying article discusses why India is meeting with the Nordic states.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have been criticised in a hundred different ways during his Norway visit. A newspaper could have attacked his government’s politics, mocked his diplomacy, or caricatured the carefully choreographed optics that follow him abroad. Instead, Norwegian daily Aftenposten reached for the oldest racist colonial cliche ever used against India, the snake charmer.
Of the dozens of stories about the insulting cartoon cartoonist Marvin Halleraker is named in only a couple. Most prominently in this clip from NewsX Live profiling the cartoonist.
Firstpost covers the Aftenposten slight along with a look at other recent cartoons from the Western World depicting India as a backward third-world nation.
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