Dear Reader,
Over the past months, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organisation that is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has held events across the country to celebrate its centenary. It has been congratulated and endorsed on social media by a long list of top Indian public figures, including many movie stars, and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi – who began his political career as an RSS pracharak – has publicly praised the organisation and released a special commemorative stamp and coin.
The RSS was founded on Vijayadashami day in 1925. This year, by strange coincidence, the festival fell on 2 October, which was also Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s birth anniversary. Gandhi was assassinated by an RSS member in 1948. In the words of his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi, “Gandhi wanted a free India which would be for everybody: Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, Hindus … Those who ultimately did kill him did not want an India for everybody. They wanted an India where some people would be supreme.”
Amid the celebrations, over the past month and a half, Himal has been publishing a podcast series of thoughtful, sobering conversations between the peace activist Harsh Mander and top scholars and observers of the RSS. Himal’s virtual cover for November 2025 presents this special series, titled ‘Saffron Siege’.
In the series’ opener, Rajmohan Gandhi speaks about the RSS’s virulent antagonism towards M K Gandhi, leading to his assassination. Subsequent conversations analyse the strategies by which the RSS expanded its influence over Indian public life, and the growth of the sprawling ecosystem of right-wing organisations that it has built over the past 100 years – particularly since the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the 1990s, and once more after the rise of Modi and his BJP to national power in 2014. Historian Mridula Mukherjee tells Mander that during the formation of the RSS, “the thought that Hindus have to constitute themselves as a separate nation – and are, therefore, opposed to including minorities, especially Muslims, in any idea of an Indian nation – was already there.”
The RSS has long managed to operate with impunity, despite its dubious past and links to Gandhi’s assassination. “Strangely, the RSS was allowed to remain outside the purview of all legalities because it remained a non-registered organisation and no government objected, not even Congress,” the political commentator Apoorvanand says.
The series also features Tariq Thachil and Kamal Nayan Choubey discussing the RSS’s outreach to Adivasis, Bhanwar Meghwanshi on how it has won over large sections of Dalits, and Tanika Sarkar on the RSS’s patriarchal structure and its outlook on women.
The series runs to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday. You can watch each episode on Himal’s YouTube channel, or listen to audio versions of the conversations on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Himal’s podcasts bring you bold and vital conversations on Southasia that you won’t find anywhere else. It takes cool heads, courage and – most of all – resources to produce this essential journalism. We rely on your support to help us do more of it.
Himal’s earlier podcast series hosted by Harsh Mander, titled ‘Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India’, focussed on India’s crisis of Islamophobia and anti-minority hatred fuelled by the Hindu Right. Those conversations highlight the shocking realities facing Indian Muslims as a consequence of the RSS’s rise, and are worth revisiting as you delve into ‘Saffron Siege’.
All best
Roman Gautam
Editor, Himal Southasian