Opinion | Time Has Come for Congress to Come Clean on Soros Nexus
The party that had icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and others as its members, cannot have any ties with anti-India elements like George Soros
French online newspaper Mediapart made explosive revelations about Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi conspiring with notorious billionaire George Soros and Amsterdam-headquartered Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), to destabilise India. Rahul is accused of being a part of a “dangerous triangle" alongside Soros and the OCCRP, orchestrating an international campaign to undermine India’s political stability and economic growth. Soros’s Open Society Foundation, one of OCCRP’s funders, had long been involved in efforts to undermine India’s sovereignty. The OCCRP, funded by Soros and other US-based Deep State entities, works in the interests of its financiers. Their reports are timed to disrupt India’s progress and create political instability. The OCCRP receives funding from several prominent donors, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
Rahul Gandhi has been repeatedly using OCCRP reports to attack the Modi government on multiple occasions, including coordinated attempts to tarnish India’s image during the Covid-19 pandemic. OCCRP’s reports on industrialist Gautam Adani are also designed to destabilise India’s economy and fuel political unrest. French newspaper Mediapart filed a report on December 5, 2024, titled “A painful but necessary investigation", which alleged that the OCCRP concealed its links to the US deep State. OCCRP, funded largely by Soros and his affiliates, has clearly run an anti-India agenda.
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Nazi sympathiser, economic war criminal, Hinduphobic hate monger and discredited short-seller, George Soros is anti-India in more ways than one. Soros, notorious for shorting the Pound-Sterling in 1992, the Thai Baht in 1997 and the Malaysian Ringgit in 2013, has been unsuccessfully trying to effect regime changes in many countries globally and has therefore become persona-non-grata in large parts of the world. For Soros to question India’s democratic setup under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is akin to interfering in India’s internal matters. Soros may have shorted currencies, made billions and peddled deviously fake narratives but that was then. In the ‘New India’ of PM Modi, the country stands as a proudly vibrant democracy, not beholden to a fascist crook-turned billionaire, who is now a senile man with wet dreams of replacing India’s democratically elected government.
Soros falsely accused PM Modi of crony capitalism. He made these contentious remarks at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany ahead of the Munich Security Conference in 2023. Soros also alleged that so-called anti-Muslim violence in India has spearheaded the ‘meteoric rise’ of Prime Minister Modi. Well, Soros needs to know that in India, democracy has and will continue to triumph. Far from being anti-Muslim, PM Modi ensured repeal of the horrific instant triple talaq bill, thereby restoring gender justice for millions of Indian Muslim women. In sharp contrast, the Congress party’s Rajiv Gandhi undermined the Supreme Court verdict on Shah Bano by denying her a measly monthly alimony of Rs 179. Soros had earlier accused India of planning to strip millions of Muslims of their citizenship, due to the CAA, but nothing of the sort happened because CAA has nothing to do with Indian Muslims, to start with in any case.
During the course of his life, if there is one thing George Soros has hated the most, it is India and its nationalist government led by Prime Minister Modi. Through his Open Society Foundation (OSF), Soros, under the garb of running philanthropic activities, has been actively supporting and funding anti-India elements operating inside and outside India. In January 2020, he also committed $1 billion to start a global university to ‘fight nationalists’, calling them a threat to civilisation. While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Soros claimed back then that the ‘biggest and most frightening setback’ was in India, as he accused Prime M Modi of creating a Hindu nationalist state. OSF was behind vilification of the Rafale deal, despite the deal being upheld by the Supreme Court. Was Rahul Gandhi dancing to the tunes of Soros with that shameful “Chowkidar Chor Hai" jibe? Presumably, so.
Harsh Mander, a self-styled activist, was a member of Sonia Gandhis once powerful national advisory council (NAC), during the Congress led UPA regime and also on the advisory board of OSF. Will Rahul Gandhi explain the Mander-Sonia-Soros connection? As for Hinduphobic Harsh Mander, he and his NGO Karwan-e-Mohabbat had been very active in the demonstrations held at Shaheen Bagh. The key question is, why have Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi never condemned Mander?
American entity, ‘Freedom House’, with ties to Soros, downgraded India from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’, in a report in 2021 and entire Leftist-Congress cabal went about town citing this report. How dare Soros claim that India is as bad as Pakistan? India is the world’s largest democracy led by PM Modi, who is consistently rated as the world’s most popular leader. While Pakistan exports terror and is today a bankrupt State, India surpassed the UK to become the world’s fifth largest economy in nominal GDP terms, thanks to PM Modi’s stellar leadership, something acknowledged by the IMF, Mckinsey’s Bob Sternfels and the likes of Ray Dalio.
Here, one needs to know that George Soros was good friends with Rahul Gandhi’s aunt Fori (Shobha) Nehru and met her in 2009 in Chandigarh. Fori Nehru was the wife of Indira Gandhi’s cousin, Braj Kumar Nehru. The said meeting was arranged by Anil Nehru, the son of Fori and Braj Kumar Nehru. Fori was born in December 1908 in Hungary as Magdolna Friedman before changing her name.
It is notable that Salil Shetty, the global vice president of Open Society Foundation (OSF), joined Rahul Gandhi in his Bharat Jodo Yatra. Shetty had also actively participated in anti-CAA protests and farmer protests. Shetty also claimed that India’s vaccination drive against Covid-19 was a failure, despite the fact that India ran the world’s largest and fastest vaccination drive—a massive feat applauded by Bill Gates and even Antonio Guetteres of the United Nations. Worse still, Shetty, in an interview, said: “There are two viruses in this country, one is coronavirus and the other is an anti-democracy (referring to Modi) virus. There is vaccine only for one."
The Congress-Soros links get dicey with reports saying that former PM Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh was associated with one of Soros’ initiatives. A similar accusation has been levelled against Shivshankar Menon, who worked as National Security Advisor (NSA) during the Congress-led UPA regime.
In 2018, George Soros-funded NGO, Sherpa, had attempted to thwart India’s defence deal with France and stall the delivery of Rafale fighter jets. In 2021, there was a hullabaloo in India over allegations of snooping by the Modi government through the use of Israeli spyware, Pegasus. These allegations stemmed from a report by the Leftist outlet, The Wire, which in turn was fed the story by Forbidden Stories (FS). And guess what? George Soros’ OSF happens to be one of the key donors of FS. Here, one needs to remember that Rahul Gandhi had stalled the Parliament in 2021, citing the flimsy Pegasus story.
Soros has also tried to use international institutions which are funded by him, including Swedish entity V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), to tarnish the image of India under PM Modi, at a global level. HRW, which has never written against the horrifying plight of Uyghur Muslims held in concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang province, has the audacity to lecture India on human rights.
Soros has been trying to portray himself as a ‘Holocaust survivor’. The reality is that his father collaborated with the Nazis, betraying his own Jewish people. Soros, in a 1998 interview with journalist Steve Kroft on ’60 minutes Australia’, reluctantly admitted as much. Soros faked his identity, betrayed his Jewish community and worse still, allied with the genocidal Nazis, with zero remorse or guilt. That says a lot about him.
What is the common link between Anurima Bhargava of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Sunita Vishwanath and Raju Rajagopal of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), Basharat Peer, contributing writer at The New York Times, Rasheed Ahmed of Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Audrey Truschke and Shaik Ubaid, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami backed radical outfit, IAMC? All these names have directly or indirectly benefitted monetarily or otherwise from the largesse of George Soros. Likes of Basharat Peer, Sunita Vishwanath and Anurima Bhargava have either held Soros fellowships in the past and/or worked at Soros-owned entities. IAMC regularly pedals anti-India and anti-Hindu drivel and supports banned outfits like the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
Congressman, a close confidante of Sonia Gandhi and former vice-president of India, Hamid Ansari, insulted India at an IAMC event in January 2022. As for HfHR, it works closely with IAMC and feverishly pedals anti-Hindu narratives. If you join the dots, can you not see what is clear as day? George Soros, the new 92-year-old poster boy of the Congress party, is at the epicentre of every anti-India and anti-Hindu narrative in the recent past. Why do Rahul Gandhi and the Congress still support Soros? That begets an answer. Also, Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, as erstwhile Congress president and UPA chairperson, needs to answer what she was doing then as the co-president of the “Forum of Democratic Leaders of Asia Pacific" (FDL-AP), an organisation that openly supported secessionism in Kashmir?
For too long, Rahul has made reckless allegations at PM Modi and scurried away. Shoot and scoot will not work anymore. It’s time for Rahul to answer what is so tempting about the Soros-owned “nafrat ki dukaan", which has enticed him and his party’s people to stand in solidarity with the Goebbelsian, George Soros?
The time has come for the Congress to look into it all and come clean on these serious charges. The party that had icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and others as its members, cannot have any ties with anti-India elements like Soros.
Sanju Verma is an economist, national spokesperson of the BJP and the bestselling author of ‘The Modi Gambit’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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