“Norway’s snake charmer cartoon exposes the racism that ‘press freedom rank’ seeks to mask”, First Post. May 21, 2026
“Truth to tell, I was in two minds about writing this piece. A nation and a people laser-focused on their rise and confident of their place in the world should not get perturbed by barking dogs on the street. Aftenposten, Norway’s ‘newspaper of record’, that has published a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a snake charmer, with a headline that translates to: “A sly and slightly annoying man”, is known for its ‘offensive’ portrayal of world leaders — a marker seemingly of “press freedom”.
That “press freedom” façade collapses, however, when a newspaper has to dig deep in colonial-era racist tropes to ground that “offense” against a visiting prime minister, a democratically elected leader of 1.4 billion people. Would the poster boy of western liberal media dare to portray an African leader as a “blackface”? A Jew as a ‘money grabber’? Chinese leaders as “yellow”? Native Americans as “noble savages”? When racist iconographies that have been categorised as taboo for others but are selectively applied in the case of Indians, that is not “editorial independence”, “press freedom” or even “cultural ignorance”.
It is racism, practiced with the quiet confidence of a people who have never once been asked to justify it, and practiced against a people that are not global aesthetic victims. And that’s why it needs to be called out every single time………”
Read full article at firstpost.com
