In his abiding personal mission to establish open societies across the world, billionaire George Soros has strangely attacked open societies like the US, India, and parts of Europe but has allied with the closed and cloistered ideologies like the far-Left and Islamism. It is the rich man’s ego, his naive and dangerous pursuit of shaping world politics by even steamrolling the will of a people if needed, and his own deep intellectual contradictions and compromises that have caused him to fail again and again.
Soros’s interest in India is long and rumoured to be prodded by pro-Pakistan, anti-Russia elements of America’s Deep State. It is clear from his recent proclamations that the spectacular rise of the nation under Narendra Modi and guided by Hindutva troubles him.
In fact, any proud and prosperous nation — from the US to Israel, and from Russia to his own country of origin Hungary — bothers him. The new India clashes with his idea of a stateless, chaotic world in which carrion-eaters like him benefit by backing puppet regimes and militias.
He has been outlawed in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Malaysia and other places. India has put his Open Society Foundation on the ‘prior permission’ list of incoming foreign funds after his hostile 2020 speech in which he pledged $1 billion to effect regime change in nations with rising nationalism like India.
Funding and involvement of OSF in anti-CAA and anti-farm laws protests have been reported widely. Salil Shetty, the vice president of OSF India, has walked with Congress scion Rahul Gandhi during the recent Bharat Jodo Yatra.
Soros wants to overturn the repeated and resounding verdict of Indian democracy by creating chaos from the streets to the stock markets. His idea of open society is fired by the teachings of his mentor, philosopher Karl Popper, a communist who later turned against all totalitarian instincts and fiercely criticised Western philosophical heavyweights from Plato to Hegel and Marx to Freud.
But Soros’s undoing lies chiefly in his own contradictions. He is a capitalist with a vision of controlled capitalism and philanthropy. But he creates and works through the worst far-Left anarchists and even groups accused of terror. His hand is seen in BLM to PFI. He has made Islamism and Communism, two most authoritarian and violent ideologies, allies in his vision to build a more “open” world. What kind of open society can be built with groups espousing such violent and closed ideologies?
Besides, Soros does not understand Bharat. He looks at it from his blinkered notion of the Western nation-state. He is pushing against an idea that does not exist here.
“The concept of nation was, in fact, Girilal Jain argued, alien to the Hindu temperament and genius. It [nation] was essentially semitic in character, even if it arose in western Europe in the eighteenth century when it had successfully shaken off the Church’s stranglehold. For, like Christianity and Islam, it too emphasised the exclusion of those who did not belong to the charmed circle (territorial, linguistic or ethnic) as much as it emphasised the inclusion of those who fell within the circle,” scholar Meenakshi Jain writes in the introduction to her father Girilal Jain’s book, The Hindu Phenomenon. “By contrast, the essential spirit of Hinduism was inclusivist, and not exclusivist, by definition. Such a spirit must seek to abolish and not build boundaries. That is why he held that the Hindus could not sustain an anti-Muslim feeling except temporarily and, that too, under provocation.”
Soros has already lied that India is about to cancel the citizenship of millions of Muslims. He is mistaking a civilisational revival for narrow nationalism and waging a war against an idea which does not exist. He is also up against a leadership core like Modi, Amit Shah, Ajit Doval, and S Jaishankar who do not act under provocation. They have the ‘Stithpragya’ or a zero-emotion, even-intellect approach to crisis and solutions.
This is another war Soros has already lost.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
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