- Tuesday, March 04, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
A day after Smriti Irani, one of the top ministers of India’s Narendra Modi government slammed Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros over his remarks on prime minister Modi, her colleague Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, also hit out at the 92-year-old businessman, calling him “old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous”.
He also accused Soros as one who “still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works”.
Jaishankar, while addressing a session at the Raisina@Sydney Dialogue in Sydney, Jaishankar said, “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…such people actually invest resources in shaping narratives.”
The Indian diplomat also said that people like Soros think an election is good if the person they want to see wins and if the election sees a different outcome, they say it is a flawed democracy, NDTV reported.
“And the beauty is that all this is done under the pretence of advocacy of open society,” Jaishankar, who is not known for mincing his words, said.
Soros, who set up the Open Society Foundations to ‘promote democratic governance’, recently said Modi “is no democrat” and alleged that “inciting violence against Muslims was an important factor in his meteoric rise”.
Targeting Soros on a broader question over ‘casual comments’ on undermining democracy in India, Jaishankar said the former “actually thinks that it doesn’t matter that this is a country of 1.4 billion people — we are almost that — whose voters decide how the country should run.”
“It worries us. We are a country that went through colonialism, we know the dangers of what happens when there’s outside interference,” he added.
On Soros’s remark that Modi is not a democrat, the Indian foreign minister mentioned his earlier comments on alleged threat to Muslims’ citizenship in India, calling it “ridiculous”.
“Mr Soros said India is a democratic country, but he doesn’t think the prime minister of India is a democrat. He earlier accused us of planning to strip millions of Muslims of their citizenship which of course didn’t happen, it was a ridiculous suggestion,” the minister said in Sydney.
“If you do this kind of scaremongering…millions of people will be deprived of citizenship. It actually does real damage to the societal fabric because somebody out there believes you. You create that kind of fear psychosis,” he added.
He also termed Soros’s comments “typical of a Euro Atlantic view”.
The Raisina@Sydney event was organised by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and India’s Observer Research Foundation. Jaishankar met his Australian counterpart Penny Wong at the event and gifted her a cricket bat signed by Indian captain Rohit Sharma.
