Daily Inspiration Quote by Manmohan Singh

Protectionism, in Manmohan Singh's mouth, is less an abstract economic sin than a political reflex he learned to distrust from the inside. Singh came up as the technocrat who helped pry India out of its postcolonial, license-heavy economic cocoon in the early 1990s, when balance-of-payments crisis forced the country to trade self-reliance rhetoric for global integration. So when he repeats "has to be avoided" and "should be avoided", the insistence is the point: this is a warning about what governments reach for when voters are anxious and markets wobble.

The quiet move here is expanding the target. He doesn't stop at tariffs on goods; he pulls services and finance into the same moral frame. That's a dig at a convenient loophole in public debate, where politicians condemn old-school protectionism while smuggling in newer versions: data localization rules, barriers to foreign banks, restrictions on cross-border capital, preferential procurement, regulatory mazes dressed up as sovereignty. Singh is arguing that modern economies can sabotage openness without ever raising a tariff.

Context matters: as a head of government and former finance minister, Singh was speaking to elites who know how quickly global downturns can trigger nationalist policy spirals, and how contagious those spirals become. "Financial protectionism" is especially pointed after the 2008 crisis, when rich countries rescued their own institutions and then preached free markets abroad. The subtext is diplomatic but steel-edged: if the world wants stability, it can't treat openness as something emerging economies owe and advanced economies suspend.