As portents go, this one image would have to be counted among the most ominous for India. Captured on camera, in the majestic Dhaka State Guest House, are members of a delegation from the Open Society Foundation, led by its chair, Alex Soros—son of George Soros—and Muhammad Yunus, the interim head of the Bangladesh regime that grabbed power through a coup last year.
The latest instance of Soros’s brazen hobnobbing (that too in the capacity of a de-facto state guest) with Yunus will only deepen suspicions that the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s government was no spontaneous “people’s revolution’’ against “authoritarianism”. In the meeting, virtually injecting himself as a stakeholder, Soros junior said that he would help the “transition” wrought by the “student-led mass uprising that had created significant opportunities to chart a new path for the country”.
It may be recalled that in the immediate aftermath of the coup in Dhaka, an Indian ecosystem took it upon itself to remind the Modi government of the perils of ignoring “a central fact of modern politics”. That “authoritarian repression can work only up to a point”. And that for allegedly delegitimising dissent, Narendra Modi would meet the same fate as Sheikh Hasina.
However, the emergence of an overt George Soros link to the incumbent Dhaka regime threatens to alter the attempt at legitimising the coup. Soros, after all, is the self-proclaimed “amoral’’ agent of chaos. He admits that he does not “accept the rules… And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.”
And they certainly didn’t in Bangladesh last year when Sheikh Hasina, by her own admission, didn’t play ball with “a white man-led foreign ecosystem” that was keen on extorting concessions. Some of which would have undermined Bangladesh’s own sovereignty and short-circuited regional security. While Hasina stopped short of naming names, many geopolitical scientists interpreted her words to mean a nexus between influential US Democratic Party ultra-left legislators, Soros, and students of BRAC University in Dhaka. The university, it is well known, is financed by the Open Society University Network. The “foreign disruptor” thesis gained a measure of credibility when around the time of peaking protests in Dhaka last year, news leaked that 22 US senators had written to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to act against the Hasina regime. Of these senators who signed the letter, one was Ilhan Omar, the proverbial “Islamo-Leftist” in the US Congress and a staunch Soros camp follower.
But that was last year. It is no small coincidence that within days of taking over the presidency on January 20, Donald Trump has frozen aid to the Yunus-led interim administration.
Trump is no friend of George Soros or the so-called ultra-liberal elements within the Biden administration that are said to be aligned with the Open Society. Several of those appointed to the Trump cabinet have been tasked with dismantling the Soros ecosystem.
But Delhi would do well not to depend on Trump to drain the swamp, so to speak. Independent efforts will have to be made to smoke out elements sympathetic to the Soros ecosystem in India. Especially when it has acquired the critical mass to trigger minacious disruption.
