Strictly Personal Manmohan And Gursharan Quotes

The late Shri T.T. Krishnamachari – a great finance minister of this country – used to say that a finance minister who wanted to do something had to be aware that there were man-eaters on the streets of Delhi.

Comparing Manmohan to Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa – each of whom took his country on the path of liberalization – former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar declared that history would never forgive him for what he was doing to the country.

India is not in the same position as the United States is, as the European Union is. There, the farming population is 2 to 3 per cent of their population. Any nation can subsidise indefinitely a population which is 2 to 3 per cent of the total population. But no government in India, I can assure you, whatever may be your political compulsion, can subsidise 70 per cent of the population. We have to evolve a new path in which agriculture has to provide surpluses.9

His friends then encouraged him to contest the election for the president of the students’ union. This he did, and was promptly defeated.

I realize that silence was a common response of those who survived Partition. It spoke of their inability to explain what they had been through. It was a shield against the memory of loved ones lost, of ancestral homes abandoned.

How has India become poor? There is a conspiracy of silence when we talk about the root causes of poverty in this country. Now, all these years, in the name of planned development we have provided indiscriminate protection to Indian industry. And when you give protection to somebody, this protection is at the cost of somebody else. The rural sector, the farmers of this country have been the worst sufferers of this excessive protection that has been given to the Indian industry.

Sikh tradition frowns upon fasting, and this was something that Gursharan had never done before.

It is not simply a matter of spending more money on family planning. If our women are illiterate, you may spend as much money on family planning as you like, you will not get to a situation where the small family norm gains voluntary acceptability. For all these things we need to have a different orientation. And that is what we have been trying to do.

Unlike Lahore, Amritsar was unable to reclaim the proud position that it once commanded.

I would like to say that let us disagree, but let us not be disagreeable.