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 1,500-page manifesto that ranged across European far-right ideology, anti-Islam rhetoric, and, strikingly, an extended attempt to recruit sympathy from Hindu nationalists in India.

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, cited the 1947 partition of India as evidence for his thesis about Muslim territorial ambitions, and explicitly sought to establish ideological kinship.

The attempt prompted dismay and anger from the Hindu nationalist organizations he was trying to court. The RSS and BJP distanced themselves clearly from Breivik and from any suggestion of common cause. The association was tactically unwelcome and substantively repugnant, regardless of whatever superficial points of overlap an ideologically motivated reader might find.

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.