“From Snake Charmers to Superpower: Norway’s Uneasy Gaze at a Rising India”, Stop Hindu Dvesha, March 18, 2026
“This article examines how a resurfaced 2015 email from Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, containing a racist slur about Indians, has undermined Norway’s carefully cultivated image as a neutral moral authority. It situates the episode within Norway’s broader “peace brand,” shaped by the Nobel Peace Prize, NATO alignment, and decades of liberal internationalism. The piece argues that Rød-Larsen’s remarks, alongside his later ties to Jeffrey Epstein, expose deeper contradictions between public virtue and private conduct.
Against this backdrop, the article explores India’s rise as a confident, civilizational state that resists Western ideological templates. India’s strategic autonomy, electoral mandates, climate positions, and Global South leadership challenge long-standing Western assumptions. The analysis suggests that Norway’s discomfort reflects a wider liberal disorientation in a multipolar world. Ultimately, the article contends that sustaining moral relevance today requires humility, self-reflection, and genuine engagement with non-Western perspectives rather than inherited hierarchies.
On Christmas Day, 2015, as families across Europe and America unwrapped gifts beneath spruce trees stitched with electric stars, Terje Rød-Larsen—the silver-haired Norwegian diplomat who had once helped midwife the Oslo Accords—sat down to compose an email to Jeffrey Epstein. The message, unearthed years later among court-released materials, contained a line that seemed to have drifted in from some moth-eaten colonial club: “Have you heard the saying: when you meet an Indian and a snake, kill the Indian first![1]” The remark was not delivered in public debate or in a diplomatic cable, but in private correspondence to a man already notorious for his predatory appetites and his 2008 plea deal in Florida [2]…….”
Read full article at stophindudvesha.org
