George Soros’s appraisal of the Narendra Modi years on India’s democracy, its institutions, its magical capacity to make the likes of Gautam Adani among the world’s wealthiest in an incredibly short time have rescued the Bharatiya Janata Party regime from being merely victims of the Congress led opposition and turned it into a nation against which a global conspiracy is being hatched.
Even star cricketers from, albeit retired, like Virender Shewag have swung into action; “The whites can’t bear to see India’s progress,” he tweeted. “The hitjob on India’s market looks like a well-planned conspiracy,” he believes.
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India and Modi, the two are synonymous in the narrative of personalising the nation with the leader, are victims of conspiracies within the nation and internationally. The discourse has now expanded to include the global success of India under Modi’s leadership, the index of which is the country’s ranking as the fifth largest economy in the world as a target of the evil minded. The documentary on Modi by BBC that was prfevented from circulation under Emergency powers triggered the outcry against global conspirators. Mr Soros’s address at the Munich Security Conference has added fuel to the hyperactive defence mechanism that has swung into action, to deliver reassurance to the bhakts that all is well, Modi is the messiah and he is being victimised, so they must rally for him and the nation in peril.
Mr Soros’s address linked Adani and the Indian government. He said, “Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies. Their fate is intertwined. Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards. Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in Parliament." In saying so, Soros has said nothing different from the thousands of words out in print in the world’s leading newspapers.
The crucial difference between excoriating criticism that has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times and more, including The Economist is Soros’s prediction that the scandal will “open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naïve, but I expect a democratic revival in India."
Once upon a time Soros could read the trends of the global financial world like a wizard who could foresee the future. His genius for getting it right amassed him enormous wealth. He used that wealth to support among other things the Open Society Foundation to defend the principles of democracy, freedom and freedom of speech and human rights. In doing so, Soros is remarkably faithful to his guru, the philosopher Karl Popper, who wrote Open Society and Its Enemies, an expression that has become an idiom of the dangers to democracy.
Attacking him as “dangerous,” “opinionated” and “ old” as External Affairs minister S Jaishankar did at the Raisina@Sydney dialogue on his Australia tour, buttresses the Smriti Irani, the minister for Minority Affairs exercise in damage control, when she alleged that Soros harboured a malevolent desire to unleash an “an onslaught to the economy of India.” Not satisfied with casting aspersions that Soros did this for “personal gain,” Irani calimed “As a karyakarta of the Bharatiya Janata Party, these designs to weaken Indian democracy will be met with a might of India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” she said.
George Soros is one man with an opinion. His opinion makes him implacable critic of Modi, his policies, his friends and his style of governance. Why that should require India’s external affairs minister to use the Raisina@Sydney platform to attack Soros and talk at inordinate length about India’s vibrant democracy and its unprecedented voter participation in elections seems like a puzzle. The puzzle, however, is very easy to solve.
Talking voter turnout to the Australians was undiplomatic of Jaishankar. On average, voter turnout in Australia is over 90 per cent and has been so since 1925, when it became compulsory to vote for all enrolled voters. Be that as it may the subtext of Jaishankar’s defence of his boss, Modi, was an exercise to turn an embarrassment into an opportunity. He leveraged India’s new found role based on its geographical location to remind the world that joining a chorus against Modi will upset the new geopolitics that is being put together to contain China.
What scares the Australian government, regardless of which party is in power, is the expansionary manoeuvres of China, which has now bought Conflict Islands in Papua New Guinea and set up a defence base there. China is the adhesive that brings together the United States, Japan, Australia and India, in the body called the Quad.
Mr Jaishankar’s statement and Irani’s outrage are part of a narrative that makes Modi the centre of the new geopolitics. A Modi led India is a strong ally. A Modi led India is the alternative location for businesses that are relocating from China and searching for places where their investments and manufacturing can be parked. The best example is Apple’s plans, as disclosed in the J P Morgan report, to shift its iPhone manufacturing out of China to India. Getting on the wrong side of the regime, Jaishankar’s statement and Irani’s outburst seemed to slyly suggest would not be profitable for investors looking for alternative places to China.
If Soros is the global plotter, then China is the universal funder of the conspiracy to trash India’s rising star in the international firmament. BJP’s MP and senior lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani asserts that the BBC documentary The Modi Question was part of a Chinese conspiracy. He alleged that China funded BBC’s stories and he believed that documentaries that tarnished India’s image were paid for by India’s enemies, including China.
The conspiracy theory is now firmly in place. It has the advantage of making Modi, as the personification of national pride, a victim of domestic and international conspiracies. It turns all critics into anti-nationals and plotters.
The message is nobody should listen to anybody other than Modi. The reason as investors know to their cost and The Economist points out “India has always been a difficult place to do business.” To get things done connections are needed. “Companies with clout and collateral find it easier to raise money and bend the bureaucracy to their will.” The world is in a bind; it has a choice; trust Modi and his regime and prosper or distrust Modi and suffer.
# Soros # Narendra Modi # Adani # Indian Democracy
