Did you know that a retired top national security official sat on the board of a George Soros organisation and used an American journal to argue the US was going too easy on India?

The Man and His Affiliations

Shivshankar Menon is no peripheral figure. He served as India’s Foreign Secretary (2006-2009) and National Security Adviser to PM Manmohan Singh (2010-2014) – positions carrying direct access to classified intelligence, diplomatic strategy, and military planning. After the UPA government’s electoral defeat in 2014, Menon took up international affiliations, most significantly, a seat on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organisation that counts George Soros among its fellow trustees.

This is not something miniscule. The ICG is not a neutral academic body. Soros, whose Open Society Foundations have been under active investigation by India’s Enforcement Directorate since 2025, sits at its governance level alongside Menon. The ED found that the bulk of ₹300 crore from Soros-linked funds was routed to 12 Indian entities in media, civil society, and policy advocacy. Soros has made it his life’s mission to fight nationalism especially Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Menon chose not merely an academic fellowship with this organisation, but a Trustee position – a governance-level commitment.

The Foreign Affairs Article

In August 2020, Menon published an article in Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, read by American policymakers, diplomats, and Congressional staffers, titled “League of Nationalists: How Trump and Modi Refashioned the U.S.-Indian Relationship”.

Former Indian NSA and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon who sits on the board of Trustees of International Crisis Group with George Soros and Alex Soros had written an article lamenting that –

Trump has gone soft on PM Modi for “taking away” the rights of Muslims of J&K by… pic.twitter.com/9w6QZWPUFM

— Muji Singh Rangi (@mujifren) April 1, 2026

His central argument: that the Trump-Modi relationship was built on personal transactionalism, which had allowed Modi to pursue domestic policies the US should have challenged more firmly. Specifically, Menon characterised India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as having “excluded Muslim immigrants from the path to citizenship” and described the revocation of Article 370 as part of a pattern that had “hyphenated India’s image with Pakistan’s in a fundamental way, as religiously driven and intolerant states”.

The implicit argument was clear: the US had been too lenient on India, and the bilateral relationship was laundering India’s domestic decisions from international scrutiny.

The Factual Distortion

Menon’s characterisation of CAA is demonstrably misleading. The law does not affect the citizenship of any existing Indian Muslim, nor does it bar any Muslim from applying for citizenship through the standard naturalisation process. What it does is provide an expedited pathway for persecuted religious minorities viz, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, and Parsis who fled Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, where they face documented state-sanctioned persecution.

The exclusion of Muslims from this specific pathway is not discrimination – it reflects the fact that Muslims are the majority community in those three countries and are not fleeing religious persecution as a class. For a former NSA and career diplomat of Menon’s calibre, this is not a distinction he could have missed. The framing he chose was the framing of India’s domestic opposition – published in an American journal, at a moment when that framing was being actively weaponised to build international pressure against India.

The Larger Pattern

Menon’s Foreign Affairs piece was not isolated. At a January 2020 public event, he declared: “India has isolated itself with CAA. We are in violation of our international commitments.” He told The Wire: “We’ve lost the ability to be a model country.”

These statements were not made within India’s domestic democratic debate. They were delivered at international fora and published in global journals feeding directly into Western diplomatic pressure frameworks, UN rapporteur reports, and Soros-funded advocacy campaigns that India’s own agencies have since documented.

The Question India Has Not Yet Asked

India currently has no cooling-off period, foreign affiliation disclosure requirement, or post-service restriction for retired senior officials. A former NSA can join a Soros-linked board, publish in American foreign policy journals misrepresenting Indian law, and face no institutional accountability whatsoever.

The facts here are not in dispute: a man who held India’s most sensitive national security position subsequently became a trustee of an organisation co-governed by George Soros, and used that platform to argue, in the American foreign policy establishment’s most influential journal, that the US had been insufficiently critical of India’s elected government.

What one concludes from those facts is a matter of judgment. That they deserve to be read together, not dismissed in isolation, is beyond question.

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The post Congress-Era NSA Shivshankar Menon, A Trustee On Soros-Linked ICG, Worried About US Going ‘Soft’ On India’s Domestic Agenda appeared first on The Commune.