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

Mr. Soros, along with Bill Nye the Science Guy, Anna Wintour, Bono and fifteen other recipients was awarded the American "Presidential Medal of Freedom" by President Biden on Saturday.

From Al Jazeera, December 26:

The ruling BJP has accused the billionaire of financing opposition-championed initiatives critical of Modi that it claims are aimed at destabilising India. 

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”.... 

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