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Journalism of Courage
The Indian Express published an investigation on April 11 on an interesting contradiction in the Indian government’s position on the global advocacy funder George Soros: while the External Affairs Minister in public comments dismisses Soros as “old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous”, India has for years been a big and proud contributor to a United Nations fund that promotes democracy around the world through civil society organisations, many of whom have close links to Soros’s work.
Last year, India gave $150,000 to the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF), the most among 45 donors after the US, Sweden, and Germany, and expressed “steadfast support for UNDEF as it plays a distinct role in complementing other UN efforts to strengthen democratic governance around the world”.
So why does the government attack George Soros?
In February 2023, during a speech ahead of the Munich Security Conference, Soros started to talk about industrialist Gautam Adani, and the selloff in stocks of Adani Group companies after the publication of the Hindenburg Research report. He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “no democrat” but the Adani “affair” could “open the door to a democratic revival” in India.
Soros, who spoke from a prepared text for more than 40 minutes, touched on a range of issues — climate change, the Russia-Ukraine war, social tensions in the US, the earthquake in Turkey, and the Communist Party downturn in China. He mentioned India after a reference to open and closed societies early in the speech.
“India is an interesting case,” Soros said. “It’s a democracy, but its leader, Narendra Modi, is no democrat. Inciting violence against Muslims was an important factor in his meteoric rise. Modi maintains close relations with both open and closed societies. India is a member of the Quad, which includes Australia, the US and Japan but it buys a lot of Russian oil at a steep discount and makes a lot of money out of it,” he said.
“Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies”, and “their fate is intertwined”, Soros said. “Adani is accused of stock manipulation”, and “Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in Parliament”.
This, Soros said, “will significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naive, but I expect a democratic revival in India”.
In response, Union Minister Smriti Irani said Soros had “ill intention to intervene in the democratic process of India and wanted a government that is pliable to his need”. And External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that individuals like Soros, while claiming to work for an open society, actually “invest resources in shaping narratives”.
“I could take the view that the individual in question Mr Soros is an old, rich, opinionated person, sitting in New York, who still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works. Now if I could stop at old, rich and opinionated, I would put it away. But he is old, rich, opinionated and dangerous,” Jaishankar said in Sydney, Australia.
Who exactly is George Soros?
George Soros is a hedge fund manager-turned-philanthropist who will turn 93 years old this coming August. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930 to Jewish parents, and he lived through the Nazi occupation of his country during 1944-45. His family survived Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jewish people “by securing false identity papers” and “concealing their backgrounds”, according to testimonials.
After the communists came to power in Hungary, Soros left for London in 1947. He worked part-time as a railway porter and as a night-club waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the US, where he started off initially as an analyst of European securities. In 1973, he launched his own hedge fund and came to be known for his successful currency trades, particularly his bet against the British pound in 1992.
Critics have flagged that Soros “broke” the Bank of England with the shorting of the pound, which resulted in Britain leaving the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, while bringing his fund estimated profits of more than a billion dollars. He was also alleged to have taken position through Quantum Fund against a basket of Asian currencies, especially those of Thailand and Malaysia, before the 1997 Asian financial crises, which could have been seen as a sign of overvaluation of the Thai baht in the market.
Soros is considered to be one of the pioneers of the modern hedge fund industry, and credited with popularising the concept of short-selling. In December 2022, a French court convicted him of insider trading and fined him 2.2 million euros, the amount prosecutors said he had profited from the trading. Soros called the verdict unfounded.
How did he come to be associated with progressive causes around the world?
Soros consistently gave to philanthropy, donating for causes such as human rights, education, and public health. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticise the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself,” and he helped foster America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts.
According to Bloomberg, Soros has a net worth of $8.5 billion, and he leveraged this significant financial muscle to create the Open Society Foundations — a network of foundations, partners, and projects that now have a presence in more than 100 countries. He began by establishing these foundations after the Cold War in Eastern European countries such as Poland, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
The foundations have an annual budget of over $1 billion, and Soros is ranked as one of the world’s largest private funders of groups supporting human rights, justice, and accountable government through them.
Does Soros’s Open Society work in India as well?
Open Society began working in India in 1999, and initially offered scholarships and fellowships to students to pursue studies and research at Indian institutions. In 2014, it launched an India-specific grant-making programme, supporting local organisations that work in areas such as extending access to medicine; promoting justice system reforms; and strengthening and establishing rights, public services, and community living for people with psychosocial disabilities.
Since mid-2016, however, the grant-making in India “has been constrained by government restrictions on…funding for local NGOs”, according to the company’s website.
The Open Society’s Soros Economic Development Fund is also an active social impact investor in India, and its goals include that of helping smallholder farmers and small businesses boost their incomes, and making health care, schooling, and financial services more available and affordable to a broader range of people.
Since 2008, Open Society has invested over $90 million in start-up and early funding projects managed by Bangalore-based Aspada Investments.
And what is Soros’s politics like?
Soros has been associated with political activism almost throughout his working life. He is identified as a “Democratic (Party) mega donor” in the US, and he has endorsed and funded the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. He has been critical of the growing income inequality in the US, having called for policy interventions to tackle it, especially when the Republican Party controlled the White House.
Soros has been a powerful critic of former US President Donald Trump. In January 2020, he hit out at Trump at his annual dinner at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, saying that President Xi Jinping of China was “trying to exploit Trump’s weaknesses”. He also accused Xi of using “artificial intelligence to have total control of his people”. The criticism of Trump and Xi came after their two countries had agreed to a potential “trade deal”.
Soros has been an outspoken critic of authoritarian regimes outside of the US, and has supported pro-democracy movements in countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, and Myanmar. Besides Xi, he has spoken out against Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. His philanthropy has spent millions of dollars funding school meals and human development projects in Hungary. Orban’s nationalist government has accused Soros of planning to destroy Hungary by flooding it with migrants, an accusation that Soros has denied.
He has criticised the Modi government as well. In Davos in January 2020, he mentioned the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the constitutional changes of 2019 in Kashmir, and termed these actions as the “biggest and most frightening setback” to open societies. The “democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship”, he said.
