How George Soros Became 'Enemy Number 1' for India's Modi | Narendra Modi News

New Delhi, India — As India's parliament convened for its winter session in late November, the world's largest democracy braced for a heated exchange between Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition, led by the Congress party.

The North Eastern State of Manipur is still burningafter more than a year of ethnic clashes that critics blame the local BJP government for exacerbating; the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) growth has slow down; and one of the richest men in India, Gautam Adaniis at the center of a corruption indictment in the United States.

But on a cold and gray day in mid-December, BJP leaders marched through Parliament Buildings holding placards aimed at fending off opposition criticism by associating the Congress with an unlikely villain in their eyes: George Soros.

From the beginning of 2023. the Hungarian-American financier-philanthropist has emerged as a central target of BJP rhetoric, which accuses Soros of sponsoring the country's opposition and supporting other critics of Modi with the intention of destabilizing India. These accusations have intensified ahead of the 2024 general election, in which the Hindu-majority BJP lost its majority for the first time in a decade, although it still secured enough seats to form a coalition government.

But the campaign has reached a fever pitch in recent days, with the BJP even accusing the US State Department of conspiring with Soros to undermine Modi.

In a series of posts on December 5, the BJP posted on X that Congress leaders, including Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi, had used the work of a group of investigative journalists — funded in part by the Soros Foundation and the State Department — to target the Modi government on issues , related to the economy, security and democracy.

The BJP cited an article by French media outlet Mediapart which alleged that Soros' Open Society Foundations and the State Department funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). It then drew attention to OCCRP revelations about the Modi government's alleged use of Pegasus spyware, investigations into the activities of the Adani group and reports of curtailment of religious freedom in India to suggest that Soros and the Biden administration were actually behind it. this coverage.

“The deep state had a clear objective to destabilize India by targeting Prime Minister Modi,” a BJP spokesperson told a press conference, adding that “the US State Department has always been behind this agenda (and) the OCCRP has served as a media tool for implementation on the agenda of the deep state'.

The comments aimed at the State Department surprised many analysts, as the US is one of India's closest strategic allies. But some experts suggest the move is related to domestic political posturing, also aimed at aligning the Modi government with the incoming Trump administration's insistence on how the “deep state” is conspiring to undermine democracy.

“The instrumentalization of Western criticism into a domestic political platform represents a fairly new phenomenon in Modi's India,” said Asim Ali, a political researcher. It represented an effort, he said, to construct a narrative of “a clash between a 'Western-backed coalition' and a 'popularly-backed nationalist coalition.'

“easy target”

In January 2023 US-based forensic financial research firm Hindenburg alleged in a report that the Adani Group engaged in “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme spanning decades”.

After the report was released, Adani Group shares fell by about $112 billion in value before recovering in the following days. The firm has since followed up with more research and analysis of the conglomerate's business practices.

The Adani conglomerate has denied the allegations. Hindenburg, in turn, received a show-cause notice from India's capital market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), accusing the group of using non-public information to build short positions against Adani Group.

But allegations of fraud and corruption became the focus of the Congress-led campaign against Modi and Adani in India's then-upcoming parliamentary elections.

Congress leader Gandhi said in Parliament in February 2023 that “government policies are tailor-made to benefit the Adani Group”. It showed two pictures of the prime minister and the billionaire sharing a private jet and of Modi taking off in an Adani Group jet for a campaign ahead of the 2014 national elections.

In February 2023 Soros intervened in the Indian political war for Adani. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he said the Adani crisis would “significantly weaken” Modi's “grip” on the Indian government.

This was welcomed fierce condemnation from Modi's party. Then-federal minister Smriti Irani said the founder of the Open Society Foundation “has now announced his ill intentions to interfere in democratic processes (in India). India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar described the billionaire as “old, rich and suspicious…a dangerous man”.

Al Jazeera has sought answers from the Open Society Foundations about the allegations leveled against it by the BJP and ministers in the Modi government, but has yet to receive a response. In September 2023 however, it issued a statement regarding its operations in India, saying, “As of mid-2016. grantmaking in India is limited by government restrictions on our funding to local NGOs.”

But the recent criticism of Soros is not so much about the billionaire, said Nilanjan Sircar, a political scientist at the Center for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi.

“Soros is an easy target: he represents a lot of money, he represents a position that is critical of Modi, and of course he funds a lot of things,” Sircar said. “But it's not about him as this abstract being that everyone hates – rather it's his alleged association with a set of social and political actors that the BJP is trying to denigrate in India.”

Following the recent US indictment of Adani on bribery charges in India, which the group has denied, Modi's party has stepped up its attacks on the Congress and Soros, trying to portray deep ties between the two. The BJP cited alleged Soros funding of the Forum of Democratic Leaders Asia-Pacific (FDL-AP), which has Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi's mother, as its co-chair to support its claim. “Soros is not a citizen of this country and he wants to create instability in the country,” said Jagdambika Pal, a BJP member of parliament.

The Congress, however, rejected suggestions that it was influenced by a foreign actor and insisted that the BJP's campaign against Soros was aimed at distracting the country from the Manipur crisis, India's economic challenges and the US indictment of Adani in an alleged bribery scheme.

BJP leader and spokesperson Vijay Chauthaiwala declined a request from Al Jazeera for comment on criticism of the party's attacks on Soros.

Meanwhile, the French media Mediapart published publicly statementsaid it “strongly condemns the instrumentalization of the recently published OCCRP investigative article … to serve the BJP's political agenda and attack freedom of the press.”

The anti-Soros narrative

India is not the only country where right-wing movements have targeted Soros, putting the 94-year-old the heart of world conspiracies.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused Soros of trying to push immigrants into Europe and tried to stop the billionaire's support for groups in the country through a legislative bill. In the US, supporters of the newly elected President Donald Trump often accused Soros — without evidence — to fund Black Lives Matter protests and migrant caravans headed for the US during the first Trump administration.

Often these conspiracies also carry anti-Semitic undertones, critics say.

But the campaign in India is different, according to research by Joyojeet Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. Ann analysis X posts about Soros found that Indian influencers pushing conspiracy theories about him were generally “careful not to use anti-Semitic tropes” and rather focused on his “soft spot for Muslims,” ​​Pal told Al Jazeera. In addition, it translates into alleged “hatred of Hindus,” according to that narrative, Pal said.

Pal's research found that several social media accounts specifically belonging to BJP politicians “were instrumental in bringing out the key content” against Soros when the party took issue with his comments about Adani and Modi. “However, the main content boosters were (pro-Modi) influencers… by aggressively retweeting content to go viral.”

Portraying Soros as a shadowy puppeteer “is very attractive” to some political movements, Pal said, because it “suggests a broader conspiracy,” portraying their opponents “as weak enough that they have to take orders from a foreign manipulator.”

In India, attacks on Soros have moved from social platforms such as X and Instagram to WhatsApp chats and are increasingly appearing on mainstream television, where he is targeted by BJP spokesmen and party supporters.

As a result, “people down to the villages know that there is an entity called Soros that is targeting India, but none of them know exactly who this person is,” Pal said. “An unknown enemy is much scarier than one you can see and appreciate.”

“Deaf” or “posture”?

For many observers of India's foreign relations, the big surprise in recent days came from the BJP's decision to paint the US State Department as a party to an alleged Soros-led conspiracy against the Modi government.

In a media briefing on December 5, Sambit Patra, a BJP spokesperson and parliamentarian, insisted that “50 percent of OCCRP's funding comes directly from the US State Department … (and) serves as a media tool to carry out a deep state agenda.” .

On December 7, the State Department said the BJP's allegations were “disappointing”, adding that the US “has long been a champion of media freedom around the world”.

Experts also questioned the BJP's allegations.

“The Indian attack seems tone-deaf and out of touch with the reality that the US State Department seems to have gone out of its way to express its desire to strengthen and deepen ties with India,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at The Wilson Centre, a Washington-based think tank. “This is the exact opposite of wanting to denigrate and destabilize the country.”

The US government is “really bending over backwards to show how committed they are to their partnership with India” on many fronts, from security, technology and trade to education, he said.

But Kugelman noted that “BJP's posturing may be for the incoming Trump administration, which has essentially made the same type of argument against the so-called US deep state.”

Sircar and Ali, meanwhile, said the BJP's focus on Soros as a villain was – in their view – fundamentally rooted in domestic politics. Modi, Ali said, wants to use “anti-Western nationalism as an attractive nationalist plank in parts of India resistant to the lure of Hindu nationalism.”

And in the person of Soros, the ruling party of India found the face to put on its target.