New Delhi, India — As India’s parliament convened for its winter session in late November, the world’s largest democracy braced for heated clashes between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition led by the Congress Party.
The northeastern state Manipur is still burningafter more than a year of ethnic clashes that critics have accused the local BJP government of intensifying; The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth has increased slowed 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 the Parliament building with placards aimed at pushing back against opposition criticism by linking the Congress to what they saw as an unlikely villain: George Soros.
Since early 2023, the Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist has become the central target of the BJP’s rhetoric, which accuses Soros of supporting the country’s opposition and supporting other Modi critics with the intent of destabilizing India. Those allegations intensified in the run-up to 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 put together a coalition government.
But the campaign has reached fever pitch in recent days, with the BJP even accusing the US State Department of colluding with Soros to undermine Modi.
In a series of posts on December 5, the BJP hit out at Modi government on issues of economy, security and democracy.
The BJP cited an article by French media outlet Mediapart that claimed Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the State Department funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Subsequently, attention was drawn to OCCRP’s revelations about the Modi government’s alleged use of Pegasus spyware, investigations into the activities of the Adani Group, and reports of the decline in religious freedom in India, suggesting that Soros and the Biden government were actually behind this reporting.
“The deep state had a clear aim to destabilize India by targeting Prime Minister Modi,” a BJP spokesman said at a press conference, adding: “Behind this agenda has always been the US State Department (and) OCCRP has acted as Medium served.” Instrument for implementing a deep state agenda”.
The comments aimed at the State Department surprised many analysts as the US is one of India’s closest strategic allies. But some experts have suggested the move is a domestic political stance also aimed at reconciling the Modi government with the new Trump administration’s insistence that the “deep state” is conspiring to to undermine democracy.
“The instrumentalization of Western criticism in a domestic political platform is a fairly new phenomenon in Modi’s India,” said Asim Ali, a political researcher. It represents an attempt, he said, to build the narrative of a “confrontation between a ‘Western-backed coalition’ and a ‘popular-backed nationalist coalition’.”
An “easy target”
In January 2023, US-based forensic financial research firm Hindenburg alleged in a report that the Adani Group had been involved in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme” over the decades.
Following the release of the report, the value of Adani Group shares fell by about $112 billion before recovering in the following days. Since then, the company has conducted further research and analysis into the conglomerate’s business practices.
The Adani Group has rejected the allegations. Hindenburg, in turn, received a flagship notice from India’s capital markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), accusing the group of using non-public information to build short positions against the Adani Group.
But the fraud and corruption allegations became the centerpiece of the Congress-led campaign against Modi and Adani in the then-upcoming Indian general election.
Congress leader Gandhi claimed in Parliament in February 2023 that “government policies are tailor-made to favor the Adani Group”. He showed two photos of the prime minister and the billionaire sharing a private jet and of Modi taking off to campaign ahead of the 2014 national elections in an Adani Group jet.
In February 2023, Soros plunged into India’s political war over Adani. At the Munich Security Conference, he said the Adani crisis would “significantly weaken” Modi’s “stranglehold” on the Indian government.
This was complied with angry condemnation from Modi’s party. Then-federal minister Smriti Irani said the founder of the Open Society Foundation had “now declared his evil intentions to interfere in (India’s) democratic processes.” India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar described the billionaire as “an old, rich, stubborn… dangerous person.”
Al Jazeera has reached out to the Open Society Foundations for responses to the allegations made against them by the BJP and ministers in the Modi government, but has not yet received a response. However, in September 2023, it issued a statement regarding its operations in India, saying: “Since mid-2016, our grantmaking in India has been constrained by government restrictions on funding local NGOs.”
But the latest criticism of Soros is not so much about the billionaire, said Neelanjan Sircar, political scientist at the Center for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi.
“Soros is an easy target: he stands for a lot of money, he takes a position critical of Modi and of course finances a lot of things,” said Sircar. “But it’s not about him as this abstract entity that everyone can hate – it’s more about his alleged connection to a range of social and political actors that the BJP is trying to vilify in India.”
Since the recent U.S. indictment of Adani over bribery allegations in India, which the group has denied, Modi’s party has stepped up its attacks on Congress and Soros and sought to portray deep ties between the two. To support its claim, the BJP cited Soros’s alleged funding of the Forum of Democratic Leaders in the Asia-Pacific (FDL-AP), of which Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s mother, is co-president. “Soros is not a citizen of this country and he wants to create instability in the country,” said Jagdambika Pal, a BJP lawmaker.
The Congress, however, has rejected suggestions that it is being influenced by any foreign actor, stressing that the BJP’s anti-Soros campaign aims to keep the country safe from the Manipur crisis, India’s economic challenges and the US’s case against Adani because of alleged bribery scheme.
BJP leader and spokesperson Vijay Chauthaiwala declined Al Jazeera’s request for comment on criticism of the party’s attacks on Soros.
The French media company Mediapart has now made a public statement opinionsaid it “strongly condemns the instrumentalization of his recently published investigative article on OCCRP… to serve the BJP’s political agenda and attack press freedom.”
The anti-Soros narrative
India is not the only country where right-wing movements have targeted Soros and are targeting the 94-year-old the heart of global conspiracies.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has accused Soros of wanting to push immigrants into Europe and is trying to stop the billionaire’s support for groups in the country through a draft law. In the USA, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump Soros has been frequently blamed – without evidence – to fund Black Lives Matter protests and caravans of migrants heading to the US during the first Trump administration.
These conspiracies often have anti-Semitic undertones, say critics.
However, according to a study by Joyojeet Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, the campaign in India is different. A analysis A series of posts on More broadly, according to this narrative, this leads to an alleged “hatred of Hindus,” Pal said.
Pal’s investigations found that some social media accounts explicitly owned by BJP politicians were “important in disseminating crucial anti-Soros content” as the party pushed back against his comments on Adani and Modi. “However, the main amplifiers of content were (pro-Modi) influencers…aggressively retweeting content to make it viral.”
Portraying Soros as a shady puppet master is “very attractive” to some political movements, Pal said, because it “suggests a broader conspiracy” and portrays their opponents “as weak enough to have to take orders from a foreign manipulator.”
In India, attacks against Soros have moved from social platforms such as X and Instagram to WhatsApp chats and increasingly to mainstream television shows, where he is targeted by BJP spokesmen and party supporters.
As a result, “people right down to the villages know that there is this 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 assess.”
“Deafness” or “posture”?
For many observers of Indian foreign relations, the big surprise of the last few days has been the BJP’s decision to portray the US State Department as a party to the alleged Soros-led conspiracy against the Modi government.
In a media briefing on December 5, Sambit Patra, a BJP spokesman and parliamentarian, insisted that “50 percent of OCCRP funding comes directly from the US State Department… (and) has served as a media tool to implement a deep state agenda.” “. .
On December 7, the State Department said the BJP’s allegations were “disappointing,” adding that the U.S. has been a “long-time champion of media freedom around the world.”
Experts also questioned the BJP’s allegations.
“The Indian attack appears to be tone-deaf and out of touch with reality in the sense that the US State Department appears to have gone out of its way to express its desire to strengthen and deepen relations with India,” said Michael Kugelman, Director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, a think tank based in Washington, DC “It’s the exact opposite of trying to slander and destabilize the country.”
The U.S. government has “really gone above and beyond to show how committed it is to partnering with India” on multiple fronts, from security, technology and trade to education, he said.
But Kugelman noted that “the BJP’s stance could be in favor of the new Trump administration, which has made essentially the same arguments against the so-called US deep state.”
Sircar and Ali, meanwhile, both said that they believe the BJP’s focus on Soros as a villain is fundamentally rooted in domestic politics. Modi, Ali said, wanted to “use anti-Western nationalism as an attractive nationalist prop in parts of India resistant to the lure of Hindu nationalism.”
And in Soros, India’s ruling party has found the face it can put on its dartboard.
