There are important lessons for India in the murderous violence in Norway: lessons it can ignore only at risk to its own survival.
In 2008, Hindutva leader B.L. Sharma ‘Prem' held a secret meeting with key members of a terrorist group responsible for a nationwide bombing campaign targeting Muslims. “It has been a year since I sent some three lakh letters, distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat but these Brahmins and Banias have not done anything and neither will they [do anything],” he is recorded to have said in documents obtained by prosecutors. “It is not that physical power is the only way to make a difference,” he concluded, “but to awaken people mentally, I believe that you have to set fire to society.”
Last week, Anders Behring Breivik, armed with assault weapons and an improvised explosive device fabricated from the chemicals he used to fertilize the farm that had made him a millionaire in his mid-20s, set out to put Norway on fire.
Even though a spatial universe separated the blonde, blue-eyed Mr. Breivik from the saffron-clad neo-Sikh Mr. Sharma, their ideas rested on much the same intellectual firmament.
In much media reportage, Mr. Breivik has been characterised as a deranged loner: a Muslim-hating Christian fanatic whose ideas and actions placed him outside of society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Breivik's mode of praxis was, in fact, entirely consistent with the periodic acts of mass violence European fascists have carried out since World War II. More important, Mr. Breivik's ideas, like those of Mr. Sharma, were firmly rooted in mainstream right-wing discourse.
Fascist terror
In the autumn of 1980, a wave of right-wing terrorist attacks tore through Europe. In August that year, 84 people were killed and 180 injured when a bomb ripped through the Bologna railway station. Eleven people were killed when the famous Munich Oktoberfest was targeted on September 26; four persons died when a bomb went off in front of a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Paris on October 2.
Little attention, the scholar Bruce Hoffman noted in a 1984 paper, had been paid to right-wing terrorists by Europe's police forces. Their eyes, firmly focussed on left-wing organisations, had characterised the right “as ‘kooks', ‘clowns', ‘little Fuhrers', and, with regard to their young, ‘political punk rockers'.” Less than four months before the Oktoberfest bombing, Dr. Hoffman wrote, an official German Interior Ministry publication dismissed the threat from neo-Nazi groups, saying they were “most armed with self-made bats and chains.”
Earlier this year, the analysts who had authored the European Police organisation Europol's Terrorism Situation Report made much the same mistake as they had before the 1984 bombings. Lack of cohesion and public threat, they claimed, “went a long way towards accounting for the diminished impact of right-wing terrorism and extremism in the European Union.”
Zero terrorist attacks might have been a persuasive empirical argument — if it was not for the fact that no EU member-state, bar Hungary, actually records acts of right-wing terrorism using those terms.
Europol's 2010 report, in fact, presented a considerably less sanguine assessment of the situation. Noting the 2008 and 2009 arrests of British fascists for possession of explosives and toxins, the report flagged the danger from “individuals motivated by extreme right-wing views who act alone.”
The report also pointed to the heating-up of a climate of hatred: large attendances at white-supremacist rock concerts, the growing muscle of fascist groups like Blood and Honour and the English Defence League, fire-bomb attacks on members of the Roma minority in several countries, and military training to the cadre.
Yet, the authors of the 2011 Europol report saw little reason for alarm. In a thoughtful 2008 report, a consortium of Dutch organisations noted that “right-wing terrorism is not always labelled as such.” Because “right-wing movements use the local traditions, values, and characteristics to define their own identity,” the report argued, “many non-rightist citizens recognize and even sympathize with some of the organization's political opinions”— a formulation which will be familiar to Indians, where communal violence is almost never referred to as a form of mass terrorism.
Thomas Sheehan, who surveyed the Italian neo-fascist resurgence before the 1980 bombings, arrived at much the same conclusion decades ago. “In 1976 and again in 1978,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “judges in Rome, Turin and Milan fell over each other in their haste to absolve neo-fascists of crimes ranging from murdering a policeman to ‘reconstituting Fascism' [a crime under post-war Italian law]”.
“When it comes to fascist terrorism,” Mr. Sheehan wryly concluded, “Italian authorities seem to be a bit blind in the right eye.”
Political crisis
Europe's fascist parties have little electoral muscle today but reports suggest that a substantial renaissance is under way. The resurgence is linked to a larger political crisis. In 1995, commentator Ignacio Ramonet argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union had provoked a crisis for Europe's great parties of the right, as for its left. The right's failure to provide coherent answers to the crisis of identity provoked by a globalising world, and its support for a new economic order which engendered mass unemployment and growing income disparities, empowered neo-fascism.
“People feel,” Mr. Ramonet wrote in a commentary in the French newspaper, Le Monde, “that they have been abandoned by governments which they see as corrupt and in the hands of big business.”
In the mid-1990s, fascist groups reached an electoral peak: Jorg Haider's Liberals won 22 per cent of the vote in Austria; Carl Igar Hagen's Progress Party became the second-largest party in Norway; Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance claimed 15 per cent of the vote in Italy; while the Belgian Vlaams Blok gained 12.3 per cent in Flanders, Belgium. In France, the centrist Union for French Democracy was compelled to accept support from the National Front in five provinces.
Europe's mainstream right-wing leadership rapidly appropriated key elements of the fascist platform, and successfully whittled away at their electoral success: but ultimately failed to address the issues Mr. Ramonet had flagged.
Now, many are turning to new splinter groups, and online mobilisation. Mr. Brevik's comments on the website Document.no provide real insight into the frustration of the right's rank and file. His central target was what he characterised as “cultural-Marxism”: “an anti-European hate-ideology,” he wrote in September 2009, “whose purpose is to destroy European culture, identity and Christianity in general.”
For Mr. Breivik, cultural Marxism's central crime was to have de-masculinised European identity. In his view, “Muslim boys learn pride in their own religion, culture and cultural-conservative values at home, while Norwegian men have been feminized and taught excessive tolerance.”
He railed against the media's supposed blackout of the supposed “100 racial / jihadi murder of Norwegians in the last 15 years.” “Many young people are apathetic as a result,” Mr. Brevik observed, “others are very racist. They repay what they perceive as racism with racism.”
Mr. Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been reluctant to describe himself as a fascist — a common feature of European far-right discourse. He wrote: “I equate multiculturalism with the other hate-ideologies: Nazism (anti-Jewish), communism (anti-individualism) and Islam (anti-Kaffir).”
These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of ideas in mainstream European neo-conservatism. In 1978, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to popular fears that Britain “might be swamped by people of a different culture.” In 1989, Ms Thatcher asserted that “human rights did not begin with the French Revolution.” Instead, they “really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity”— in other words, faith, not reason.
In recent years, key European politicians have also used language not dissimilar to Mr Brevik. Last year, Angela Merkel asserted that multikulti, or multiculturalism, had failed. David Cameron, too, assailed “the doctrine of state multiculturalism,” which he said had “encouraged different cultures to live separate lives.” France's Nicolas Sarkozy was more blunt: “multiculturalism is a failure. The truth is that in our democracies, we cared too much about the identity of the migrant and not sufficiently about the identity of the country that welcomed him.”
Mr. Brevik's grievance, like Mr. Sharma's, was that these politicians were unwilling to act on their words — and that the people he claimed to love for cared too little to rebel.
The Norwegian terrorist's 1,518-page pseudonymous testament, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, promises his new “Knights Templar” order will “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.” He threatens an apocalyptic war against “traitors” enabling a Muslim takeover of Europe: a war, he says, will claim up to “45,000 dead and 1 million wounded cultural Marxists/multiculturalists.”
For India, there are several important lessons. Like's Europe's mainstream right-wing parties, the BJP has condemned the terrorism of the right — but not the thought system which drives it. Its refusal to engage in serious introspection, or even to unequivocally condemn Hindutva violence, has been nothing short of disgraceful. Liberal parties, including the Congress, have been equally evasive in their critique of both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism.
Besieged as India is by multiple fundamentalisms, in the throes of a social crisis that runs far deeper than in Europe, with institutions far weaker, it must reflect carefully on Mr. Brevik's story — or run real risks to its survival.
Keywords: Utoya island shooting, Norway blasts, Anders Behring Breivik
What is the meaning of the term 'neo Sikh'? I thought Sikhism was a respectable religious philosophy. Here it is smeared as being something bad. Furthermore, there are quite a few distortions of truth in this article. Almost all Europeans (even those with more conservative political leanings) abhor the ignorant rantings of this Norwegian psychopath, and the ensuing carnage. Any neo-nazi, extreme right-wing, eugenecist, racist groups of individuals exist at the fringe of our European society and don't represent common thought. Tjust shout louder and commit extreme actions to attract attention. This attention comes but makes us even firmer in the resolve to clean our society of such sick people. We won't murder them, but trace them and chase them until they are all firmly locked away. No one in their right minds would wish a repeat of 'Nazi' Germany. Human beings all breathe the same air, we all need to start celebrating our humanity and similarities more.
Fundamental difference between Europe's multiculturalism and india's 'unity in diversity' is they are multi-racial but our race is one.
Mr. Swamy forgets that there were no Jehadist Bomb blasts in Norway. India had many and will have many more! A weak governement catering to vote banks and media generally hostile to majority issues became fodder for backlash by disgruntled people who are under arrest now.
You try to link someone's thoughts and a series of separate historic events in faraway lands without any relationship or progression of it whatsoever.
There is a social setting for the operation of acts of extreme violence. In Norway xenophobia has reached almost fever pitch. It is time for the media to report responsibly on matters which concern migrants to their country. This does not mean ignoring important social issues like forced marriages among certain migrant groups, but the fact remains that there is widespread suspicion of most migrant groups in Norway today. I would also like to take issue with Nasir Khan above who writes that Norway (is) a brilliant example of how a just socio-political system should be. Regrettably, things look very good on paper, but the Norwegian judicial system is seriously flawed. The system is skewed against ordinary individuals and families, and if you are a migrant to that country, you cannot expect to be treated fairly.
All communal riots must be described as terrorist activities. Right wing Hindutva idealogy as someone has already commented is 100 year old or may be more. So, all these communal riots are a result of our thought process which is essentially born out of hatred for a different type of praying, worshipping in Indian context because blood,family,life style and sentiments all are same between Muslims and Hindus or Hindus and Sikhs etc., We ,Indians are more culturally integrated than a white Europian with a black or coloured Muslim immigrants in his country in life style,blood and family systems.
So, Mr.Praveen swami's too much projection of Brevick's story or ideas is not teneble. We need not be too much afraid of so called 'multiculturalism' because this so called 'multiculture' does not exist in its pure form in India because Indians have a distinctive 'indian' identity across all religions in India.That is as we all of us know is the greatness of Hinduism.
Hatred from any one will surely end up in destruction of the societies harmony,peace, integrity and its very existence.. This massacre in Norway is a big lesson for Indian society that so called Indian Political parties which spread hatred will hamper our peaceful existance by their sick ideology of hatred for minorities..Our pride is UNITY IN DIVERSITY..
Thanks for an interesting thought provoking article. Although there are some superficial similarities between Right wing extremism between Indian hindutva organisations and European neo nazi's, there are some inherent differences in the way societies work in these continents.In India our cultural institutions are stronger and majority of them abhor violence and also recent economic growth has allowed people to put their minds at other places. There is a growng anti muslim feeling throughout the world,which can be blamed on the poor handling of the jihadi propaganda by the liberal muslims and the ruling governments. More revolutions like the egypts and in Inda better education of muslims and getting them out of their 'bastis' would help with it. There are places in London ,where mullahs were calling for 'shariat law' in uk. strict laws in managing such people would reduce the support right wing at present recieves from general community in europe.
Terrorism is not the monopoly of any particular religion, race, or nationality. Terrorists may attack us from any angle so we need to be vigilant. This incidence has bolstered the fact that not all terrorists are Muslims.
The unfortunate thing is that most Hindutvadis and right wing Islamphobes don't realise that the huge massacres that did happen in the medieval period in North West India were done by the Mongols who were Buddhist and animist at that time. The killed not only Indians but also Muslims in Iraq and Iran and enslaved many thousands to take them to Europe which are the origin of the Roma people. Gengis Khan and his generation were all Buddhists following shaman customs and didn't become Muslims until the third generation. So would then now start blaming Buddhists and killing or persecuting them? Its unfortunate that we as a society have not learn from the Jewish holocaust and if things don't change, the Muslims are set to be the new jews of the 21st century.
Frankly, I don't see why India needs to be dragged into this. Europe has been turning a blind eye to rising right wing fanaticism for a long time. It has come overground in France where Sarkozy and his party has been banning burkhas, turbans and what not, and also in Switzerland where they banned minarets. All I can say is this attack is a consequence of Europe letting the right wing grow uncontrolled to having such an important voice in governing their states.
The discription of B.L.Sharma as 'neo-Sikh' is baffling. I believe that a clarification is required to ascertain the intentions, which portray a rightist attitude(the words 'neo-Sikh') on a subject dealing with 'dangers' of rightist ideology. Nevertheless, the incisive analysis by Praveen Swami is commendable as it links globalisation with local alienation. Identity crisis has become a global phenomenon thanks to the sweeping spirit of capitalist economy. The individual identity is being increasingly defined by wealth. The social, religious, cultural identities are becoming blurred, leading to production of a brainwashed, uniform, predictable supply of behaviours (easily circumvented) to enhance the cause of globalisation and money economy. Indeed, these are testing times for our civilisation.
Progress and education is the way out of this madness. India has tons of issues but is moving in the right direction (much needs to be corrected though). Open mind/a learning mind...is what should be encouraged in schools.
Norwegian mass-murderer 'Anders Behring Breivik' and his association to right wing can't be paralleled to bogey of 'saffron terror' echoed time and again by pseudo-secularists in India. Terror knows no color and it doesn't differentiate between human blood, any kind of terror is just pure terror. Politicization of terror would be the most unfortunate thing to happen in post independent India. Need is to fight terror with a firm resolve rather than wasting time in semantics of right wing, left wing, hindu, muslim, christian or sikh terror. When a fellow kin dies, it hurts equally in every family irrespective of color, creed, caste, religion, region, country or any other mark of differentiation. Terror is a crime against humanity and lets all be united to fight against it.
The enormity of the crimes of this Christian fundamentalist with extreme rightist agenda and his well-planned and methodical slaughter of so many young people baffles many of us in Norway and around the world. Norway is a free and democratic country where people can express their views. There is a high level of tolerance and acceptance of people of European and non-European origin who have different religions, modes of living and social ways. These things make Norway a brilliant example of how a just socio-political system should be. At the same time, I am also aware of the dangers and pressures that non-European communities in Norway and the rest of the western world could have faced if this mass murderer were not a blond native Norwegian but a non-European. We know how the non-white communities, especially Muslims, were treated throughout Europe and North America after the 9/11. So, no matter who was responsible for the 9/11, all Muslim communities had to face terror and insults at the hands of the white people. I had seen and also experienced myself how the Muslims were subjected to much humiliation in Norway at the hands of some people.
This awful act has waiting to happen it can be seen as the backlash against liberal elite insistence of ignoring outrageous assaults on European culture and values and the reluctance of conservatives to engage in anything other than rhetoric. Only greater vigilance by security forces will stop further incidents. The arrogance of the liberal political elites to impose a particular form of society on a strata of a largely homogenous population that the politicians are able to detach themselves it makes them as culpable as the deluded young man whose finger was pulling the trigger.
The views and actions of Brievik are symptomatic of the frustrations of many especially poor whites who feel disenfranchised politically and economically and see a conspiracy between media, politicians and institutions that drowns out their fears and concerns. The lawful moral route for their expressions the ballot box and political lobbying is perceived to be useless.
i would like to mention that please do not use the word Hindutva so feely. Attaching a negative connotation to it will drive a section to a corner. This Sharma is an unknown entity in most of india (so was this Norwegian terrorist) with no credibility and ability to influence people. As its wrong to lable any terrorism caused by a person following Islam as Islamic terror then same holds for other religions too. If the author has done it to sensationalise the article and score some points instead of driving home his point then its all the more worrisome.
Your article is factually incorrect from the beginning. He was not made a millionaire through farming. The farm was purchased shortly before he carried out his attacks, to provide as a cover story for purchasing the fertilizer he required and also a location to safely create his explosives.
Very Thought provoking article indeed. Wish you had included the data on the no of deaths in the past decade due to extreme wright wing propagandists.Majority have been caused by them.
Why has Praveen Swami described Hindutva leader B.L. Sharma as a 'neo-Sikh'? This is very disturbing indeed. This sounds bigoted. Why should he be described in this way?
The rightist leanings may be just rather a reaction. Tolerance,to the least, is adaptive. In today's closely knit globe, one who rejects mixing of culture and the resultant synthesis is just non-adaptive and likely to invoke the cycle of action-reaction.All the constituents have a role and are to be blamed for any threat to multi-culturalism and media's role should not be to mask one at the cost of other.
Mr. Swamy's narrative is curious. He does fail to note that the BJP is not some fringe, scamp element. It ran governance in India, arguably better than the current Congress led UPA coalition. Furthermore it runs more state governments in India than the Congress as of last count. Equating a mainstream political party with European far Right using the unproven and motivated allegations of 'Hindu Terror' festering for the past 3 years, has no basis in fact. It may try to stroke a certain narrative, which will find resonance in audiences that don't know India well or are smitten with the Hindu bashing gravy train, such as the recent Fai. Mr. Swamy does disservice to his own record and that of the Publication by putting out such stories.
Well,first of all which of the parties is communal remains a moot point.Every party in the Indian History derives some of its ideologies from either the right-wing or the lefts.So, the only thing to learn from the Norwegian massacre is that anything extreme is bad and can lead to a disaster.The extremists' dogmatic attitude is somewhat correct
but not in a complete manner.
It is interesting that Anders Brevik refers continuously to India in his manifesto.
Very early on, he writes about "Hindu Kush" meaning Hindu slayer.
Later, he speaks of 1300 years of genocide by Muslims all over the world, including in India.
Later still, hes speaks about Indians on his Facebook mailing list.
But probably most significantly, he writes that the "new independent Europe" should support India in "driving out Muslims from the country"
He also describes Pakistanis as "Muslim Indians".
In India, anti-Muslim feeling represented by the far right Hindutva factions are over a 100 years old. In Europe, they are relatively recent.
It is terrifying to imagine what will happen when the two movements hook up, as they undoubtedly will in the age of the Internet.
Mr Swami would do well to reconsider his projection of the Brevik phenomenon on continuum with the neo-fascist movement in Europre. There is a very glaring and sharp discontinuity that he misses - redux of muscular Jihadist ideology in the last 2 decades or so and the concomitant failure of the European left, with its postmodernist leanings, to muster an ideological response to it except to blame the West itself for it.
There is a very real difference b/w the recent rightward shift in European politics and superficially similar patterns in the past - this time the movement is sustained by a genuine repulsion, in the minds of the common people, for the nihilist/terrorist/regressive/jihadi ideologies that are often defended by the Left and Centre-Left.
European Left is to blame for abandoning the Enlightenment and Modernism and sacrificing liberty at the altar of cultural relativism.
The devil in the human heart is very powerful.It makes a man do whatever he commands.What can be more astonishing that the killer has no guilty feeling and yet he says that deaths were necessary .With the increasing number of conveniences and the modern life style composed of nuclear families,our potential seems to be declining.Studies say that we only utilize 5-10% of our talents in our complete life time.The aim of life must be crystal clear before us from our adolescence-Concentrating mind,body and soul to achieve our targets.
Thank you for an interesting analysis. The same ideology of hatred are driving both Hindutva in India and right-wing extremism of this particular brand in Europe. Mr Breivik is a mass murderer and a mere criminal. Killing children will never make him succeed in realising his twisted political visions. Neither will Hindutva or Islamist violence in India. It takes more than bombs and murder to break the solidarity of a nation.
Both India, Norway and Europe must cherish and strengthen their multicultural and democratic societies. Unity is indeed possible in diversity, the love of many is infinitely stronger than the simple hate of a few.
In this respect, Breivik and other European right-wing extremists certainly have a lot to learn from India.
Please Email the Editor