Norwegian daily under fire for ‘blatantly racist’ cartoon of PM Modi as a snake charmer

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.

The cartoon went viral on social media. Users started to point out the racist tones of the art.

Social media users called it “derogatory” and racist.

One user said, “Frank Rossavik and Aftenposten have produced a lazy, racist caricature of Prime Minister Modi as a cross-legged snake-charmer piping a fuel nozzle out of a basket, the sort of tired colonial drivel one expects from a fading European rag desperate for relevance.”

“West has completely run out of structural arguments. When they cannot beat India on GDP growth rates, cannot match India's digital public infrastructure, & cannot stop India from anchoring global supply chains, their only remaining tool is to pull out a racist drawing of a snake charmer.”

One user asked, “Would Aftenposten publish an image of the Nigerian President as a witch doctor during a state visit? The South African President as a tribal dancer? The answer is unambiguously NO, and every editor in Oslo knows it. The snake charmer exists in a specific category of racialised imagery that European liberal media has retired for every civilisation except the Indian one. That selective retirement is not press freedom. That exemption has a name. It is called racism.”

Netizens pointed out that the Norwegian daily resorts to using an outdated racist depiction of India. They also pointed out how the West continues to refuse to move on from depicting the country as a land of snake charmers, elephants, and other colonial-era fantasies.

In 2022, a Spanish newspaper also drew criticism after it used a snake charmer symbolism in its coverage of India’s economic rise.

In 2014, PM Modi at Madison Square Garden spoke about how India went from being stereotyped as a country of snake charmers to becoming technologically driven “mouse charmers.”