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 Congress-led opposition.

North-eastern state Manipur is still burningAfter more than a year of ethnic clashes that critics accused the local BJP government of exacerbating; Growth of the country’s GDP Slow down; One of the richest men in India, Gautam Adaniand is at the heart of an indictment of corruption in the United States.

But on a cold, gray day in mid-December, BJP leaders marched through Parliament House carrying placards aimed at deflecting opposition criticism by associating Congress with an unlikely villain: George Soros.

Since early 2023, the Hungarian-American financier has emerged as a prime target of the BJP’s rhetoric, which accuses Soros of fostering dissent in the country and supporting other Modi critics with the intent of destabilizing India. These accusations have intensified ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections in which the Hindu-majority Bharatiya Janata Party lost its majority for the first time in a decade, although it still won enough seats to form a coalition government.

But the campaign reached its peak 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 posted on X that Congress leaders, including opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, used the work of a group of investigative journalists — partly funded by the Soros Foundation and the State Department — to target the Modi government on issues related to Economics, security and democracy.

The BJP cited an article published by French media outlet Mediapart alleging that Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the State Department funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Next, she drew attention to OCCRP’s revelations about the alleged use of Pegasus for spying by the Modi government, investigations into Adani Group activity, and reports about the decline of religious freedom in India to suggest that Soros and the Biden administration were behind the cover-up. .

“The deep state had a clear goal to destabilize India by targeting Prime Minister Modi,” a BJP spokesperson said at a press conference, adding that “the US State Department has always been behind this agenda.” [and] The OCCRP has served as a media tool to implement the deep state’s agenda.

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

“The exploitation of Western criticism in a domestic political platform represents a fairly new phenomenon in India under Modi,” said Asim Ali, a political researcher. He said that it represents an effort to build a narrative of “confrontation between the “Western-backed coalition” and the “popularly supported National Coalition.”

“Easy target”

In January 2023, US-based forensic financial research firm Hindenburg alleged in a report that Adani Group was involved in a “brazen, decades-long scheme of stock manipulation and accounting fraud.”

After the report was issued, the value of Adani Group shares fell by about $112 billion, before recovering in the following days. Since then, the company has pursued further research and analysis on the group’s business practices.

The Adani Group 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-selling positions against the Adani Group.

But allegations of fraud and corruption became the focus of the campaign led by the Congress Party against Modi and Adani in the then upcoming Indian parliamentary elections.

Congress leader Gandhi claimed in Parliament in February 2023 that the “government’s policies are tailor-made to favor the Adani group”. He showed two pictures of the Prime Minister and the billionaire sharing a private plane and of Modi taking off on an Adani Group plane for the campaign ahead of the 2014 national elections.

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

This was met Angry condemnation from Modi’s party. Federal Minister Smriti Irani said that the founder of the Open Society Foundations “has now declared his ill intentions to interfere in the matter.” [India’s] Democratic processes.” Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar described the billionaire as “an old, rich, stubborn person… and a dangerous person.”

Al Jazeera has requested responses from the Open Society Foundations to the allegations made against it by the BJP and ministers in the Modi government, but has not yet received a response. However, in September 2023, it issued a statement about its activities in India, saying: “Since mid-2016, our grantmaking in India has been constrained by government restrictions on our funding to local NGOs.”

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

“Soros is an easy target: he represents a lot of money, he represents a position critical of Modi, and of course he funds a lot of things,” Sircar said. “But it’s not about him being this abstract entity that everyone hates — it’s about his alleged connection to a host of social and political actors that the BJP is trying to discredit within India.”

Since Adani was recently indicted by the United States, over bribery allegations in India that the group denied, Modi’s party has intensified its attacks on Congress and Soros, trying to portray deep ties between the two. The BJP cited Soros’ alleged funding of the Forum of Democratic Leaders of Asia-Pacific (FDL-AP), headed by Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s mother, to support its demands. “Soros is not a citizen of this country and wants to create instability in the country,” said Jagdambika Pal, a BJP MP.

However, the Congress has rejected suggestions that it is influenced by any foreign actor, insisting that the BJP’s anti-Soros campaign is aimed at distracting the country’s attention from the Manipur crisis, India’s economic challenges and the US indictment of Adani in an alleged bribery case. a plan.

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

Meanwhile, French media Mediapart is in the audience statementShe said she “strongly condemns the exploitation of her recently published investigative article on OCCRP…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, as the 94-year-old has been placed there The heart of global conspiracies.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused Soros of trying to push migrants into Europe and tried to stop the billionaire’s support for groups in the country through a legislative bill. In the United States, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump Soros has often been accused – Without evidence – of funding Black Lives Matter protests and migrant caravans heading to the United States during the first Trump administration.

Critics say these conspiracies often carry anti-Semitic undertones.

But the campaign in India is different, according to research by Joyojit Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. that analysis From posts on This therefore translates into “alleged hatred for Hindus,” according to this account, Pal said.

Pal’s research found that a few social media accounts explicitly belonging to BJP politicians “were significant in spreading mainstream content” against Soros when the party opposed his comments on Adani and Modi. “However, they were the main speakers for the content [pro-Modi] Influencers… by aggressively retweeting content to make it viral.”

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

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

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

“Tone deaf” or “attitudes”?

Many observers of Indian foreign relations believe that the biggest surprise in recent days came as a result of the decision taken by the Bharatiya Janata Party to portray the US State Department as a party to the supposed conspiracy led by Soros against the Modi government.

At a press conference on December 5, Sambit Patra, BJP spokesperson and parliamentarian, insisted that “50% of the funding for the OCCRP project comes directly from the US State Department… [and] “It served as a media tool to implement the deep state’s agenda.”

On December 7, the State Department said the BJP’s accusations were “disappointing” and added that the United States had “long been a champion of media freedom around the world.”

Experts also questioned the BJP’s accusations.

“The Indian attack appears tone-deaf and out of step with reality, in the sense that the US State Department appears to have done its best 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, D.C. “It is completely inconsistent with the desire to harm and destabilize the country.”

He said the US government is “bending over backwards to show its commitment to partnering with India” on multiple fronts, from security, technology and trade to education.

But Kugelman noted that “the BJP’s position may favor the incoming Trump administration, which has made essentially the same kind of arguments against the so-called US deep state.”

Meanwhile, both Sircar and Ali said the BJP’s focus on Soros as a villain was – in their view – fundamentally rooted in domestic politics. Ali said Modi wants to use “anti-Western nationalism as an attractive nationalist element in parts of India that are able to withstand the lure of Hindu nationalism.”

In Soros, India’s ruling party has found the face to put on its dartboard.