S. Jaishankar takes on George Soros; “Mr Soros is an old, rich opinionated person….”
The Hungarian-American businessman Billionaire investor George Soros, who established the Open Society Foundations to ‘promote democratic governance’, had said PM Modi “is no democrat”, alleging that “inciting violence against Muslims was an important factor in his meteoric rise”.
Responding to that, While Addressing a session with Australian Minister Chris Brown at the Raisina@Sydney Dialogue, External affairs minister S. 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.”
External Affairs Minister S.Jaishnkar said ‘people like him’ think an election is good if the person they want to see, wins, and if the election throws up a different outcome, then they will say it is a flawed democracy.
“And the beauty is that all this is done under the pretence of advocacy of open society,” the External Affairs Minister said.
S. Jaishankar said he (Mr Soros) “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.
“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.
EAM also termed George Soros’s comments “typical of a Euro-Atlantic view”.
He said there was “a debate and conversation that we must have on democracy”, including whose values defined democracy as the world rebalanced and became less Euro-Atlantic.
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