Satire

During Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s May 2026 state visit to Oslo, Norway’s leading daily, Aftenposten, ignited a global social media storm by publishing a controversial political cartoon depicting him as a "snake charmer" holding a fuel-pump hose. Intended to critique India’s strategic energy imports, the illustration backfired heavily. Critics and global netizens fiercely condemned the imagery as a blatantly racist, neo-colonial trope reducing a modern digital superpower to a 19th-century stereotype. Digital platforms erupted with a massive counter-troll campaign, weaponizing data on India’s technological public infrastructure to expose the fading relevance of outdated Western media biases.