Tag: Harsh Mander

Thomas Blom Hansen, Qurban Ali & Harsh Mander on the RSS’s role in communal violence

Note: Whoever keeps deleting this post must know that I will keep re-posting it.   Non-interference in other people’s threads is a sacred principle on BP. 

In this episode of Saffron Siege, the anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen and journalist Qurban Ali join Harsh Mander to examine how the RSS has triggered, enabled and executed riots, targeted communal attacks and other forms of communal violence in India over the 100 years of its existence. Qurban Ali who has reported on many of these incidents on the ground documents how many commissions have found the RSS culpable in riots dating back to Sholapur in 1967. Hansen talks about how violence is a central thesis of the RSS not only as a physical act but as a state of mind.

 

TM Krishna & Harsh Mander on Tamil Nadu’s resistance of the RSS

This podcast is part of Season 2 of “Partitions of the Heart”.  “Saffron Siege” runs from 17 September to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday.

In this episode, musician and political commentator T M Krishna speaks to Harsh Mander about Tamil Nadu’s long history of social movements that has led to this resistance. They examine how the state’s linguistic and language-based faith traditions have stood as a bulwark against the RSS’s attempts at homogenisation under a Hindutva umbrella. Krishna points out the multiple streams of religious influence on arts in India, especially in music, and how the RSS has tried to deny this past in service of the ideological project. “Carnatic music is symbolic of something for the RSS. It is symbolic of that puritanical and cultural superiority… Homogenisation, or rather a linearisation, of that is convenient for them.”

 

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