Salil Tripathi on Anders Behring Breivik's Badge from India

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Notes on Washington and the world by the staff of The New Yorker.

July 29, 2011

Oslo: A Badge from India

Posted by Salil Tripathi

badge.jpg

When Anders Behring Breivik came to Utoya Island, he was wearing a badge that showed a red dagger impaling a white skull; on the skull’s forehead were a crescent and star, a hammer and sickle, and a swastika—the symbols of Islam, Communism, and Nazism. Breivik’s rambling manifesto, which runs into fifteen hundred pages, reveals his hatred of Islam and Communism. The presence of the swastika in his axis of evil was more confusing, given Breivik’s reported ties with the European far right. But then logic cannot explain how Breivik’s mind works.

Breivik, it turned out, had ordered the badge from the Web site of the Indian Art Company, in Varanasi, a northern Indian city that Hindus consider holy. The company is actually a small shop of traditional craftsmen, many of them weavers, in operation since 1933 in a tiny lane in the crowded city. The man who runs the business, Mohammed Aslam Ansari, is Muslim.

About a year ago, Breivik placed an order for samples of the badge, one made of silk and one of metal, and Ansari expected an order of two hundred more after Breivik approved the sample. After receiving a modest payment (Breivik’s manifesto says he paid a hundred and fifty dollars; Ansari says he received about ten thousand rupees, or about two hundred and twenty-five dollars), Ansari sent the samples to Breivik’s address in Norway. The larger order didn’t materialize, and Ansari forgot all about it. Living in a city abounding with Hindu rituals, Ansari might not have found the swastika, which is also an ancient symbol Hindus consider auspicious, to be as unambiguously sinister as it appears in other countries. If he knew a bit more than that, he may not have seen the harm, or grasped its scale. Anyway, his e-commerce strategy hasn’t yielded much—only a few sporadic orders. (His son told an Indian journalist that they weren’t able to keep paying the bill to the company whose servers hosted the Web site.)

Then, this week, he began receiving phone calls from journalists around the world, informing him that his badge had become linked with the massacre. In television interviews since, Ansari has looked slightly puzzled, and pained, as he tries to figure out what happened.

Varanasi is a spiritual city. Situated on the banks of the holy river Ganga, its crowded ghats are often teeming with people, as Hindus come there to perform ablution rituals to wash away their sins. A death and cremation in this city is special, because it releases the Hindu from the cycle of rebirths, or samsara. Hindus immerse the ashes of the dead in the river and float little lamps commemorating the departed souls. Many Muslims live in the city, and their lives are interwoven, and largely free of tension, except when forces from outside Varanasi have intruded. One such force is Hindutva, or “Hinduness,” whose growth in the past two decades is partly an assertive reaction to what Hindutva’s adherents call the Indian government’s continued appeasement of Muslims.

Breivik’s manifesto praises Hindutva, citing amateur historians, many of whom are active in the darker alleys and corners of the Web, where they attract vociferous fans. He calls Hindus Christian fundamentalists’ natural allies in opposing Islam’s spread. At the same time, he sees Hindus (and Indians) not as his equals but fit only to perform certain tasks on a contractual basis. Leading Hindu politicians in India have distanced themselves from Breivik, except one parliamentarian from the Hindu-centric Bharatiya Janata Party, B. P. Singhal, who has been quoted as saying that Breivik’s ideas weren’t wrong, though his methods were.

Ansari is still coming to terms with the massacre in Norway. He tries to reassure a reporter from the news agency, Press Trust of India, “I have not done anything wrong intentionally. Still, I have a feeling of guilt…. If I was aware about the ill-intention of the man, I would have never accepted his business proposal.”

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