Politics & Power Quote by Manmohan Singh

In Manmohan Singh's mouth, "unity and secularism" isn't a poetic flourish; it's a governing constraint, the kind that keeps a fractious democracy from turning into a zero-sum street fight. The line reads like a budget speech for the republic: these are the non-negotiables, because the cost of abandoning them isn't abstract virtue signaling, it's political instability, communal violence, and a state that spends its energy managing fires instead of building capacity.

The word "motto" matters. It's managerial, almost technocratic, signaling Singh's instinct to treat ideology as operational policy. Secularism here is less a philosophical commitment than an administrative promise: the state will not become a proxy for majoritarian sentiment, and public institutions won't be reorganized around religious identity. "We can't afford" sharpens that into an argument from consequence. He's not asking citizens to be better people; he's warning that India has too many fault lines, too much demographic complexity, and too much historical memory of Partition to indulge identity-first governance.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke of "divisive polity" as a strategy: win by polarizing, govern by blaming. Singh frames that style not just as morally suspect but economically and institutionally ruinous, a luxury India cannot purchase. Coming from a prime minister associated with liberalization and incremental reform, the quote doubles as a plea for political bandwidth. Unity isn't sentimental togetherness; it's the precondition for doing anything else at scale - growth, welfare delivery, rights protection - without the country splintering into competing, permanently aggrieved camps.