Helle Lyng the Norwegian journalist is very much in the news. She asked the PM at a press briefing in Oslo about press freedom and the situation of minorities in India. Modiji rightly ignored her. The whole episode galvanized the left wing media in India and their fellow travellers. Reeling from the defeat in Bengal these desperados found something to cheer about. They applauded the self righteous and arrogant Helle. The Norwegian they said had exposed Modi on an international stage. Helle had even claimed that she represented a country which had the ‘freest’ media.
Helle has obviously not been taught about the dark past and present of her country. I will give her a lesson in History.
1The Sámi are the indigenous people of Norway. Between the 1700s upto 20th century they were forced into a policy of ‘ Norwegianization’. They were forced to assimilate and their children were forcibly put in boarding schools. They were forbidden to speak their native language. Their cultural practices are discouraged and stigmatised.
2 The Roma people who incidentally were from India have been discriminated against for decades in Norway.
Norway actively marginalized these groups for decades. A Norwegian policy called “Gypsy Paragraph” was an exclusionary clause in the 1927 Aliens Act that explicitly banned Roma people from entering the country. First implemented to stop the immigration of foreign Roma, it resulted in statelessness for many and was not fully abolished until 1956. In 1934, a group of 68 Norwegian Roma traveling in Europe were denied re-entry into Norway. Because of this exclusion, the group was trapped in Europe as the Nazi regime rose to power.They were detained and sent to concentration camps. Only a few survived. Even after the end of World War II, survivors and their families were barred from returning to Norway and were turned away under this law. Norway’s collaboration with Hitler was defined by the puppet government of Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fascist Nasjonal Samling party. During the German occupation in World War II Norwegian police force and administration assisted the occupying Nazi forces in registering, arresting, and deporting hundreds of Norwegian Jewish residents. Out of 772 Jews deported from Norway, only 34 survived. The Norwegian state also rapidly confiscated and auctioned off the belongings and properties of deported Jews. Norway also used controversial eugenics policies, forced sterilizations, and harsh institutionalization of marginalized groups, including the Romani people and the mentally
The most disgraceful act in the annals of History.
In 1914, at the Frogner Park exhibition in Oslo, Norway hosted a “human zoo” The exhibit featured roughly 80 individuals of Senegalese descent who were placed in a constructed African village. For months, thousands of Norwegians paid to observe these people, who were forced to perform daily life tasks in the name of entertainment. Norway staged these exhibits to justify colonization by depicting Africans as “primitive” and uncivilized, the events purported to show the “necessity” of European powers bringing civilization to the rest of the world. The displays functioned as popular, everyday entertainment. More than half of the Norwegian population (around 1.5 million people) paid to watch the Congolese people go about daily routines like cooking, eating, and crafting. Urd, a Norwegian magazine, concluded at the end of the exhibition, “It’s wonderful that we are white “
Norway Now
Minority Groups such as Kvens, Forest Finns, Romani/Tater, and Roma still face discrimination, societal prejudice (particularly anti-Roma attitudes), and barriers to preserving their cultural heritage persist.
A UN report published in15 March 2024– has urged the Government of Norway to take the necessary steps to engage people of African descent to ensure their full integration into Norwegian society, without prejudice. The report said that
People of African descent continue to face racial profiling, hate speech, racist bullying in schools, barriers to access employment and forced removal of children by Child Welfare Services. The UN report noted that, in the public and private sectors, people of African descent are discriminated against and often offered positions that are not appropriate with their qualifications and capacities, thus resulting in a lack of recognition. Regardless of their legal status, people of African descent experience discrimination daily because of their names and racial or ethnic background. For the youngest generation of Norwegian people of African descent, identity formation has been affected in many ways, as a consequence of a large-scale social and economic exclusion, which prevents them from being fully included in society.
Further, the Working Group raised concerns about the reportedly inequitable access to justice for people of African descent living in Norway who face racial discrimination and violations of their human rights. What is Helley Lyng doing about the terrible condition of minorities in Norway? By what criteria does the Press Freedom Index rank Norway first in press freedom?
Nitin Mehta
www.nitinmehta.co.uk
20 May 2026.
Further footnotes:
The Indian mystic, philosopher, and yogi Swami Sri Ananda Acharya lived in Norway for about 31 years. He arrived in the country around 1914 and settled permanently in a hermitage on the slopes of Mt. Tron in Alvdal in September 1917, where he remained until his death in 1945. This site is considered as a sacred place by Norwegians.
The possibility of Vedic presence in Helles Norway!
There are many parallels with Scandinavian countries and India. Sanskrit is the mother of the Norwegian language.
PM Modi pointed out the word Sambandh during his recent visit. In both Norwegian and Sanskrit/Hindi it means the same: Connection/ Relationship. The words for mother, father and sister are the same in Norwegian as in Sanskrit. The Norse God Thor is identical to Indra. The Norse Goddess of love and beauty was called Freya. It is from Sanskrit word Priya. Old Norse poems also mention reincarnation. Odin, another Norse God (pre Christian era) is the same as Varuna. Odin is known to have gained special powers by hanging upside down from a tree. Shukracharya too did intense penance by hanging upside down from a tree to get special powers.
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