‘I see no reason for either of us’: Shashi Tharoor's cryptic swipe at Hardeep Puri over George Soros & a New York dinner

Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor on December 21 refuted Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s claims about a 2009 incident of insisting the inclusion of US billionaire George Soros in an invite list to a dinner in New York.

Tharoor, the MP from Thiruvananthapuram, said his and Minister Puri‘s recollections of the dinner hosted by Puri in New York in when he was posted as Indian Ambassador to the US differ.

“Our recollections differ, dear Hardeep. There were several guests present at your well-attended dinner whom I had never met before. But i am not objecting; it is entirely appropriate that on such an occasion the Indian Ambassador should have a guest-list spanning a wide cross-section of influential international and local opinion. I see no reason for either of us to disavow our contacts with anyone at the earlier stages of our lives in New York or Geneva,” Tharoor said in a post on X on December 21.

“Incidentally, since you mention it, I was completely unaware of any Mr Soros having any connection to any foundation in India — and have never discussed it with him either. All i remember hearing from him at that occasion was his strong objection to our Government’s stand on the West’s responsibility for global warming,” said Tharoor.

Recalling a dinner in New York

The former Union Minister Tharoor was responding to Puri’s post in which he recalled an occasion on October 12, 2009 when Tharoor had visited New York as Minister of State for External Affairs shortly after Puri was posted as India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative at UN. Puri said he had then hosted Tharoor and his companion “at a briefing breakfast on 11 October 2009, and then for dinner on the evening of 12 October 2009.”

The conversation on X between the two politicians began on December 15 when an X user who identified himself as a BJP worker from Karnataka showed Tharoor an old post from 2009 in which he said he had “met old friend George Soros upbeat about India and curious about our neighbourhood. He’s far more than an investor: a concerned world citizen.”

Tharoor had responded to the X user’s question saying that he had ‘only met Mr Soros once more after this tweet, and that was at the home of then-Ambassador and now-BJP Minister Hardeep Singh Puri when he visited New York.

On December 20, Puri responded to this Tharoor post indicating that the Congress MP did not show the whole picture. Puri alleged that it was Tharoor who gave the list of invitees for the dinner.

Puri said that it became clear in retrospect that Soros was an invitee because he was among the benefactors of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. He said that that was why Tharoor, then Minister of State External Affairs, wanted to meet him.

Soros, 92, is a Hungarian-American hedge fund manager turned philanthropist. He moved to London in 1947, where he studied Philosophy at the London School of Economics and obtained a Master of Science in Philosophy in 1954.

Soros has become a point of discussion in the Adani Bribey allegations with the BJP leaders alleging a link with the Nehru-Gandhi family including Sonia Gandhi.

The Congress party has been protesting against the Adani Bribery charges inside and outside Parliament during the ongoing Winter Session. Last month, Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men, and seven others were indicted for fraud by US prosecutors over their alleged roles in a$265 million scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure power-supply deals. The Adani Group denied all allegations, calling them “baseless”.

Since the Adani-Hindenburg controversyin February this year, top BJP leaders have been targeting Soros, particularly after he said that Adani group’s troubles would “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government”.

The BJP countered that Soros wanted to ‘destroy’ Indian democracy and wanted some “hand-picked” people to run the government.

The BJP has alleged that Sonia Gandhi’s chairmanship of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation led to a partnership with the George Soros Foundation, ‘displaying the influence of foreign funding on Indian organisation’.