How George Soros became ‘Enemy Number 1’ for India’s Modi 

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

The northeastern state of Manipur is still burning, after more than a year of ethnic clashes that critics have accused the local BJP government of exacerbating; the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth has slowed down; and one of India’s richest men, Gautam Adani, is at the centre of a corruption indictment in the United States.

But on a cold and grey day in mid-December, BJP leaders marched through Parliament premises holding placards aimed at pushing back against opposition criticism by linking the Congress to an unlikely villain in their eyes: George Soros.

Since early 2023, the Hungarian-American financier-philanthropist has emerged as a central target of the BJP’s rhetoric, which accuses Soros of sponsoring the country’s opposition and backing other Modi critics with the intent of destabilising India. Those accusations sharpened ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections in which the Hindu majoritarian BJP lost its majority for the first time in a decade, though it still secured enough seats to cobble together a coalition government.

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

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

The BJP cited an article by French media outlet Mediapart claiming that Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the State Department funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Then, it drew attention to the OCCRP’s exposes on the alleged use of Pegasus spyware by the Modi government, investigations into the Adani group’s activity, and reports on declining religious freedom in India to suggest that Soros and the Biden administration were in effect behind this coverage.

“The deep state had a clear objective to destabilise India by targeting Prime Minister Modi,” a BJP spokesperson said at a news conference, adding that “it has always been the US State Department behind this agenda [and] OCCRP has served as a media tool for carrying out a deep state agenda”.

The comments targeting the State Department took many analysts by surprise as the US is one of India’s closest strategic allies. But some experts have suggested that the move is about domestic political posturing, aimed also at aligning the Modi government with the incoming Trump administration’s insistence on how the “deep state” conspires to undermine democracy.

“The instrumentalisation of Western criticism into a domestic political platform represents a rather new phenomenon in Modi’s India,” said Asim Ali, a political researcher. It represents an effort, he said, to build the narrative of a “face-off between a ‘Western-backed coalition’ and a ‘popularly 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 engaged in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.

After the report’s release, Adani Group’s shares plunged in value by about $112bn, before recovering over subsequent days. The firm has since followed up with more research and analysis on the conglomerate’s business practices.

The Adani conglomerate has denied the allegations. Hindenburg, in turn, received a show-cause notice from the Indian capital market 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 centrepiece of the Congress-led campaign against Modi and Adani in the then-upcoming Indian parliamentary elections.

Congress leader Gandhi alleged in Parliament in February 2023 that “the government policies are tailor-made to favour the Adani Group”. He displayed two photographs of the prime minister and the billionaire sharing a private jet and of Modi taking off in an Adani Group jet for campaigning ahead of the 2014 national election.

In February 2023, Soros waded into that Indian political war over Adani. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he said the Adani crisis “will significantly weaken” Modi’s “stranglehold” on the Indian government.

This was met with furious condemnation from Modi’s party. Then-federal minister Smriti Irani said the founder of the Open Society Foundation has “now declared his ill intentions to intervene in [India’s] democratic processes”. India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar described the billionaire as “an old, rich opinionated … dangerous person”.

Al Jazeera has sought responses from Open Society Foundations on the allegations against it levelled by the BJP and ministers in the Modi government but has not yet received a reply. However, in September 2023, it issued a statement about its activities in India, where it said, “Since mid-2016, our grant making in India has been constrained by government restrictions on our funding for local NGOs.”

But the recent criticism of Soros is not so much about the billionaire, said Neelanjan Sircar, a political scientist at the Centre 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, funds a lot of things,” said Sircar. “But it is not about him as this abstract entity for everybody to hate – rather, it is his alleged connection to a set of social and political actors that the BJP is trying to vilify within India.”

Since the recent US indictment of Adani, over allegations of bribery in India that the group has denied, Modi’s party has sharpened its attacks on the Congress and Soros, attempting to portray deep links between the two. The BJP cited alleged funding by Soros of the Forum of Democratic Leaders in Asia Pacific (FDL-AP), which has Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s mother, as co-president, to bolster its claim. “Soros is not a citizen of this country and he wants to create instability in the country,” said Jagdambika Pal, a member of parliament from the BJP.

The Congress, however, has rejected suggestions that it is influenced by any foreign actor and has insisted that the BJP’s anti-Soros campaign is 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 denied a request from Al Jazeera for comment on criticism of the party’s attacks on Soros.

Meanwhile, the French media outlet Mediapart in a public statement, said it “firmly condemns the instrumentalisation of its recently published investigative article about OCCRP … in order to serve 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, placing the 94-year-old at the heart of global conspiracies.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has accused Soros of trying to push immigrants into Europe and has tried to stop the billionaire’s support for groups in the country through a legislative bill. In the US, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump frequently accused Soros — without evidence — of financing Black Lives Matter protests and caravans of migrants headed to 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. An analysis of posts on X around Soros found that Indian influencers pushing conspiracy theories about him are generally “careful not to use anti-Semitic tropes” and rather focus on his “soft spot for Muslims”, Pal told Al Jazeera. By extension, that translates into an alleged “hatred of Hindus”, according to this narrative, Pal said.

Pal’s research found that a few social media accounts belonging explicitly to the BJP politicians “were important in putting out the key content” against Soros when the party pushed back against his comments on Adani and Modi. “However, the main amplifiers of content were [pro-Modi] influencers … by aggressively retweeting content to make it viral.”

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

In India, the attacks against Soros have moved from social platforms like X and Instagram to WhatsApp chats and increasingly shows on mainstream television where he is targeted by BJP spokespeople and party supporters.

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

‘Tone deaf’ or ‘posturing’?

To many observers of India’s foreign relations, the big surprise in recent days has come from the BJP’s decision to paint the US State Department as a party to the supposed 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] has served as a media tool for carrying out a deep state agenda”.

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

Experts too questioned the BJP’s accusations.

“The Indian attack seems tone-deaf and out of step with reality in the sense that the US State Department has seemingly gone out of its way to convey its desire to strengthen and deepen ties with India,” said Michael Kugelman, South Asia Institute director at The Wilson Centre, a Washington, DC-based think tank. “It is very opposite of wanting to malign and destabilise the country.”

The US government has been “really bending over backward to show just how committed they are to partnership with India” on multiple fronts, from security, technology, and trade, to education, he said.

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

Sircar and Ali, meanwhile, both 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 resilient to the lure of Hindu nationalism”.

And in Soros, India’s governing party has found the face to put on its dartboard.