Norway Massacre: Breivik's Manifesto Tried to Woo India's Hindu Nationalists

What did Breivik's manifesto say about India?

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian far-right extremist who killed 77 people in twin attacks on July 22, 2011 — a bombing in Oslo and a shooting massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utøya — left behind a 1,518-page manifesto that devoted a remarkable 102 pages to India, attempting to recruit sympathy from Hindu nationalists.

The manifesto's passages addressed to India reflect a deliberate if deeply distorted reading of Hindutva ideology, cherry-picking elements of Hindu nationalist thought that could be framed as analogous to Breivik's own anti-Islamic, civilizational-conflict worldview. He portrayed both movements as engaged in a common struggle against Islamic expansion and explicitly sought ideological kinship: "It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical."

How did India's Hindu nationalists respond?

The attempt prompted dismay and anger from the very organizations he was trying to court. The BJP condemned Breivik's terrorism outright, and India's mainstream Hindu nationalist organizations wanted no part of any suggested common cause. Journalist Praveen Swami wrote in The Hindu that the BJP had "condemned the terrorism of the right — but not the thought system which drives it," while also noting that liberal parties including the Congress had been evasive in their critiques of extremism on all sides.

The association was tactically unwelcome and substantively repugnant to those being courted, regardless of whatever superficial points of overlap an ideologically motivated reader might find.

What does this episode reveal about extremism?

The episode illustrates a broader phenomenon in contemporary far-right extremism: the deliberate search for international allies and ideological legitimation, the construction of a global "clash of civilizations" narrative that can absorb grievances from entirely different cultural contexts into a single framework. That the framework required spectacular violence in Norway, directed primarily at young Norwegian socialists, to make its point was a fact Breivik considered not a moral problem but a tactical necessity.

The manifesto is a document of pathology, not politics. But its attempt to recruit Hindu nationalism into its worldview is worth understanding precisely because it reveals how extremist movements seek to expand their imagined community.