My Jewish husband and I are being used as cannon fodder in BJP’s attempts to distract from Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Manipur. But there’s another reason I am being targeted.
On 28 June, I woke up to the news that my name was plastered across the Indian press. Many media outlets including Hindustan Times, Zee News, News18 and Bharat Times ran the headline, “Who is Sunita Viswanath?” I received concerned calls and messages from friends and family all around the world. Our family WhatsApp group, mostly people based in India, shut down any political conversation, and some members quietly left.
I am a New York-based human rights activist, the co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, an organisation that mobilises the Hindu community in the US to reclaim our religion from the Hindu nationalist ideology of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I co-led protests in New York and Washington, DC, during Modi’s recent United States visit. I am used to hateful remarks by right-wing Hindus. But this was a new low.
At a televised press conference on 28 June at the new BJP headquarters, minority affairs minister Smriti Irani held up a picture of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi giving a talk at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, with me sitting a few chairs away, my face circled in ink, and asked, “Why is Mr Rahul Gandhi hobnobbing with those who are funded by George Soros?” and “Is it true that Shri Gandhi met with Sunita Viswanath during his trip to the United States of America?” She then alluded to nebulous claims that philanthropist George Soros plans to destroy the Republic of India. All these wild accusations emerged because of a picture of me attending a DC town hall with Rahul Gandhi for about 50 India policy experts.
The photograph Irani shared was also tweeted by a BJP leader with the allegation that I am “nothing but a proxy of George Soros, who has committed $1 Bn to meddle in India’s internal affairs, through a network of Opposition leaders, Think Tanks, journalists, lawyers and activists.” In the same tweet, Malviya also claimed that the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), one of our close allies, is a proxy for Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party based in Pakistan, and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. Somehow, George Soros and the ISI, according to Malviya’s insinuations, have come together, through me, to destroy India.
In the US, we are quite familiar with antisemitic conspiracy theories by the far-right portraying Soros as a master manipulator and villain. Malviya’s tweet refers to a report by the Hindu nationalist platform, Disinfo Labs, which alleges that my Jewish husband and I are the perfect puppet couple to destroy Israel and India. Soros is the Indian Right’s new favourite bogeyman, with the BJP sharing a doctored video depicting Rahul Gandhi as a literal puppet of Soros.
After Smriti Irani declared that I am a Soros agent, the Indian press reported it as fact. My uncle asked his son, “Have you heard of a man called George Soros? He is destroying India!” Indians around the world have swallowed the lies of the mainstream Indian media, hook, line and sinker. A prominent Indian journalist wrote to me, “The country has gone mad.”
To set the record straight, I neither hobnobbed with Rahul Gandhi, nor am I an agent of George Soros….
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