‘Bogeyman of the Right’: George Soros and his many controversies explained

Billionaire investor George Soros has irked the Indian government with his criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A controversy erupted after Soros referred to short seller Hinderberg Research’s report on the Adani Group and Gautam Adani’s alleged ties with Modi. On Thursday (16 February), the investor said in a speech ahead of the 2023 Munich Security Conference that “Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament”. “This will significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naive, but I expect a democratic revival in India,” he said, as per Hindustan Times. Slamming Soros for his comments today, Union minister Smriti Irani urged Indians to unitedly respond to “foreign powers who try to intervene in India’s democratic processes”. Terming Soros’ statement a “declaration to destroy India’s democratic processes”, Irani said, “Those, who Soros finds pliable, need to know that India has defeated imperialistic designs before and shall do so again…As a karyakarta of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), these designs to weaken Indian democracy will be met with the might of India under the leadership of prime minister Narendra Modi”.

Those who Mr Soros finds pliable need to know India has defeated imperialistic design before & shall do again. Democracy has prevailed in India & will continue to do so. Designs to weaken Indian democracy will be met with might of India under leadership of PM Modi: Smriti Irani pic.twitter.com/KxZfugNRfN

— ANI (@ANI) February 17, 2023

Who is George Soros and how he remains embroiled in controversies? Let’s take a closer look. Investor, philanthropist and more 92-year-old George Soros is a Jewish multi-billionaire investor, hedge-fund manager and philanthropist. The Hungarian-American is among the richest people in the world, with Forbes placing his net worth at $6.7 billion. Born as György Schwartz in Hungary’s Budapest in 1930 to middle-class Jewish parents, Soros’ family changed their surname in 1936 to avoid antisemitic discrimination, as per The Guardian. When Nazis invaded Hungary during the Second World War, Soros and his family were forced to flee by disguising themselves as Christians and assuming false identities. He survived the war and after communism expanded in Hungary, Soros immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1947. He studied at the London School of Economics and later became an investment banker. In 1956, Soros moved to New York, where he worked in many Wall Street positions. He founded the Quantum Fund in the late 1960s which turned out to be “one of the most successful hedge funds of all time”, as per The Guardian.

Soros is believed to have made $44 billion through financial speculation, reported BBC.

To pursue his philanthropic endeavours, he founded Open Society Foundations and has spent his fortune to fund education, health, human rights and democracy projects across the globe, noted BBC. [caption id=“attachment_12170592” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Hungarian-American George Soros is among the richest people in the world. Reuters File Photo[/caption] As per his website, Soros has “given away more than $32 billion of his personal fortune” to fund Open Society Foundations. The man who ‘broke the Bank of England’ In the UK, Soros is famous as “the man who broke the Bank of England” in 1992. Like other currency speculators, he borrowed pounds and then sold them, propelling the price of sterling on currency markets to drop, which ultimately led the UK to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, reported BBC. His Quantum Fund earned $1 billion in the whole process. Soros ‘helped Nazis’ As per The Washington Post, this is the “ugliest conspiracy theory” about the billionaire. The unfounded allegations about Soros forsaking his fellow Jews and helping the Nazis have been spread for long. Fanning the narrative, controversial actor Rosanne Barr tweeted in 2018, “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth”. However, Soros has maintained he never confiscated property from the Jews or did the bidding of the Nazis, as per The Washington Post.  Does Soros pay people to protest? In 2018, Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed Soros was supporting activist Osman Kavala, whom the Turkish president blamed for the 2013 Gezi Park protests, reported The Washington Post. “He has so much money and he spends it this way,” the president said then. In 2020, then US president Donald Trump claimed that Soros and others are “financing antifa or anti-fascist” protesters, as per The Washington Post. Run-in with politicians Soros has donated millions of dollars to the US Democratic Party and avidly backed Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic primary race. However, his support for liberal and democratic causes has made Soros the “bogeyman of the right”, says BBC. After the 2001 September 11 attacks in the US, Soros criticised the government’s “militarist response”, fearing that then-President George W Bush would lead America into “a permanent state of war”, reported The Guardian. Soros has also had run-ins with Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, since 2010. The investor has accused Orbán of “trying to re-establish the kind of sham democracy that prevailed [in Hungary] in the period between the first and second world wars”. Orbán has also persistently attacked Soros. In an interview in 2017, Hungary’s prime minister alleged: “George Soros has bought people and organizations, and Brussels is under his influence”. “They want to demolish the fence, allow millions of immigrants into Europe, then distribute them using a mandatory mechanism — and they want to punish those who do not comply”, Orbán said then, as per Foreign Policy. Soros is also targetted by the right-wing in Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair rejecting the claim that Orbán anti-Soros campaign is antisemitic. “We see Soros as a dangerous man who does unfair and indecent things,” Eli Hazan, the director of international relations for Netanyahu’s Likud party, said in December 2017, reported Moment Magazine. After Trump won the US presidential election in 2016, Soros wrote in an op-ed that Americans voted for the Republican leader, who he called “a con artist and would-be dictator”, because “elected leaders failed to meet voters’ legitimate expectations and aspirations [and] this failure led electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism”, according to The Guardian. Meanwhile, this is not the first time Soros made remarks on prime minister Modi. Speaking about the “frightening rise of nationalism in India”, Soros said in 2020: “The biggest and most frightening setback occurred in India where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship”. With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.