Politics & Power Quote by Manmohan Singh

There is a quiet audacity in Manmohan Singh framing liberalization as an act of physical relief: getting government "off the backs" of Indians. It’s not just a policy description; it’s a moral re-casting of the state from guardian to burden, and of the entrepreneur from suspect to citizen-hero. The phrase borrows the language of oppression and redirects it toward regulation, turning bureaucracy into something almost bodily, intimate, resented.

Singh’s intent is also reputational. As a technocrat-statesman who became the face of India’s 1991 reforms, he’s staking a claim that those changes were not ideological mimicry of the West but pragmatic emancipation. The repetition of "we" is doing heavy lifting: it asserts collective legitimacy (government as reformer, not obstacle) while quietly centralizing credit around the reform team that had to sell painful change during a balance-of-payments crisis.

The subtext is a rebuke to the pre-reform "License Raj" without naming it. "Competition" is offered as a cleansing force, internally against cozy monopolies and externally against the complacency of closed markets. "Simplified and rationalized" signals a break from discretionary power - fewer permissions means fewer choke points, fewer bribes, less patronage. Then comes the most telling line: making "risk-taking" attractive. That’s an admission that the old system punished initiative, and a promise that the new one will reward ambition rather than proximity to officials.

It works rhetorically because it makes economic reform sound like democratic repair: lighter, fairer, more breathable.