India lashes out at critics after BBC raids
SYDNEY, Australia: India’s top diplomat on Saturday hit out at “scaremongering” critics who claim the South Asian country’s democracy is being corroded, singling out billionaire George Soros, a popular target for right-wing ire.
At an event in Sydney, southeastern Australia, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar rejected accusations that multiple raids on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s India offices showed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government were veering toward authoritarianism.
Jaishankar defended the premier, painting detractors as “scaremongering,” holding an antiquated “Euro-Atlantic view” of democracy and failing to respect the Indian people’s democratic choice.
“There are still people in the world who believe that their definition, their preferences, their views must override everything else,” he said.
Indian tax authorities raided the BBC’s offices in the capital New Delhi and the western city of Mumbai just weeks after the broadcaster aired a documentary on Modi’s actions during deadly sectarian riots in 2002.
Jaishankar singled out philanthropist Soros, who recently highlighted Modi’s close ties with fraud-accused businesses run by ally Gautam Adani, and suggested that while India was a democracy, Modi “is no democrat.”
Jaishankar denounced the 92-yearold Hungarian-born financier as “old, rich, opinionated and dangerous,” and someone who “still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works.”
“He 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.”
Soros has long funded projects promoting transparency and democracy, making him the subject of countless conspiracy theories and politically motivated attacks.
“People like him think an election is good if the person we want to see wins. If the election throws up a different outcome, then we actually will say it’s a flawed democracy,” Jaishankar said.