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K. R. Narayanan

37 quotes

“As the President of India, I had lots of experiences that were full of pain and helplessness. There were occasions when I could do nothing for people and for the nation. These experiences have pained me a lot. They have depressed me a lot. I have agonised because of the limitations of power. Power and the helplessness surrounding it are a peculiar tragedy, in fact.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: S. S. Shashi Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Volume 100, Anmol Publications, 1996, p. 260
“I see and understand both the symbolic as well as the substantive elements of my life. Sometimes I visualise it as a journey of an individual from a remote village on the sidelines of society to the hub of social standing. But at the same time I also realise that my life encapsulates the ability of the democratic system to accommodate and empower marginalised sections of society.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: Venkitesh Ramakrishnan Citizen President K.R. Narayanan, 1920-2005, Frontline
“That the nation has found a consensus for its highest office in some one who has sprung from the grass-roots of our society and grown up in the dust and heat of this sacred land is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centre stage of our social and political life. It is this larger significance of my election rather than any personal sense of honour that makes me rejoice on this occasion.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: Speech By Shri Kocheril Raman Narayanan On His Assumption Of Office As President Of India, National Informatics Center, 25 July, 1997
“Indian civilization has had the unique honour of demonstrating to the world that man does not live by bread alone. Cultural, moral and spiritual values have always formed the fundamental underpinning of our society. To-day there are signs of the weakening of the moral and spiritual fibre in our public life with evils of communalism, w:Casteismcasteism, violence and corruption bedevilling our society.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“India had entertained throughout its history a world vision. Our sages and seers had thought in terms of the happiness of the whole of humanity. And Jawaharlal Nehru had designed a foreign policy for India with a world outlook. We have a role to play in the world and a message to give to the world. We can do that effectively only if we are united and strong and in peace and friendship with our neighbours.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I was] not an executive President but a working President and working within the four corners of the Constitution.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: The Hindu Editor A salute to Citizen Narayanan, The Hindu, 10 November 2011
“Relations between India and China have been founded on solid understanding of the affinities of the cultures and the civilizations of the two countries, and the imperatives of peaceful co-existence and close co-operation between them in the post-cold war world. I believe that India-China friendship and co-operation could be a shining example of concord and harmonious relations between two ancient civilizations and the foundation for a just, stable and peaceful world order.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Press Information Bureau in: Address By His Excellency Shri K.R. Narayanan, President Of The Republic Of India At Peking University, press Information Bureau, 30 May 2000
“The courts are no longer cathedrals. They are...casinos where the throw of the dice matters.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lina Gonsalves in: Women and Human Rights, APH Publishing, 2001
“My having been in the LSE made me suspect in the eyes of the Right but funnily enough it did not help me with the Left either. After getting a seat, and a pretty unsafe one at that, my campaign started, my opposite number from the Left said in his speeches that I was an Anglicised sahib who knew nothing of Kerala, did not eat Malayali food and did not even know how to wear a mundu dhoti]! So there were problems for me on both sides.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If someone insults me, I only feel an infinite pity for him.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the time of Indian independence, I was a student in London and we the students, Indian students, celebrated the moment with great joy. I was exhilarated, no doubt, but the shadow of two events fell upon the jollifications. First, a sense of disappointment that the imperialist objective of dividing India has been achieved. And second, the communal carnage which took place in India cast another shadow on it.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“India has been a cauldron of dreams, ideas and aspirations of the humankind and this is a distinctive character of India, and India in that sense represents the world in miniature. If a system can succeed in India, it will indicate the possibility of such success in the world as a whole.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is an over-informing force which ultimately brings all the ideas together, and does not allow one idea alone to run away with India. And, that has been demonstrated again and again in terms of conflicting ideologies, conflicting social systems, political systems, all these somehow have been contained in an overall framework.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy, I think, has established itself firmly [In India] and, there is no doubt that, it is one of the irremovable things which we have achieved. But it is facing problems at every stage. I don't think that we can rest on our oars in the maintenance of democracy. Critical times are facing us. There are, there will be, crises, that we will have to face. So constant adjustments of even democracy to changing times, is necessary. But one thing is clear. The idea of democracy and institutions of democracy that we have built up, have survived the test of critical situations.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We started with pure parliamentary democracy at the Centre and in the States. Now this has been extended to the grassroots, though not in the Gandhian way, but according to the dream of Gandhiji, along that line. We have extended democracy to the grassroots, in the panchayati raj experiment and I think that has given solid support to our parliamentary system. Our parliamentary system could not have survived, without this basic grassroot support. But all these can function only in an atmosphere of social and economic progress and greater equality.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to give a sense of economic liberation to the masses and for that, I think the basic thing we have done or we attempted to do, in the beginning, and we have not yet completed that process, is that of land reforms. I think some of the Indian states have been successful in bringing about land reforms but to get a sensation of economic empowerment in society, even a bit of land of their own, is necessary for the common people and it has been shown by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, which have achieved remarkable economic successes, that land reform was one basic prior thing they did.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...success part of story of fifty years of Independence … Maintaining and strengthening political democracy at various levels has moved to new levels. Conducting successive free and fair elections, evolving and developing institutions like a relatively independent press, functioning opposition parties offering role choice, an independent and high calibre judiciary, free public debate which sometimes comes under assault, defying freedom of expression and creativity and secularism as the basic feature of our constitutional and social well being.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we started in 1947, I think 18% or something was the literacy rate in India. Now it is 52%. It is not a disastrous performance but it is not sufficient, certainly. But some parts of India have done better, my own State of Kerala has done remarkably well. Tamil Nadu is achieving greater success in literacy, so is Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The State of Himachal, is more or less reaching 100% literacy. Some of the states of the North-East have full literacy today. So, the movement of literacy has been uneven, but progressive.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...education is the key to health and to social progress. The fact is that the average expectation of life of an Indian has doubled since Independence. In fact, it is 61 years now as against 28 or 30 years at the time of Independence.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...now, the new class of landlords — they may not be landlords but practically they are — and therefore a new class of people have come up, powerful politically and socially, and it has become very difficult to implement any land reforms today, because of that.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the slow, but steady movement of the lower classes along the scale of the class system. But it has been very very slow. It took 2000 years. But it is something which is going on, and something which is almost spectacular in certain sectors today -assertion of the backward classes, of scheduled castes, of women.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many serious political scientists who have argued that the age of sovereignty is over. They want a frontier less, borderless world, and that is a very dangerous philosophy which may suit the most developed and powerful countries of the world, and not those who are small and developing. That is why we are rather cautious in our liberalisation policy. We went ahead in certain sectors. We went rather slowly in other sectors. And, this has helped us.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many in India fought against some of the ideas of changing our patent system. And we have signed the World Trade Organisation Treaty but still we have to safeguard ourselves because, many of the developed countries are, though they have signed the same WTO, but they are not practising it; anti-dumping measures they are adopting very liberally, as also tariff, non-tariff barriers. So we have to carefully argue within the WTO system our case.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Communal mobilisation in the long run will not succeed in India because Indian society cannot be mobilized communally. Even the last elections have shown that communities, religious communities, castes did not vote solidly for one party.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the Indian public are weighed down by their problems, and becoming rather insular in their outlook because of their preoccupation with their own problems. We have to rouse them and make them conscious that we can progress only as a part of the world and as a part of Asia.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Nehruvian dream [the ending of poverty and ignorance and inequality of opportunity.] today has become a pungent necessity, inescapable necessity. In 1947, one could say that it was a dream, it was Gandhi's dream also. But now it has become an inescapable necessity for us to translate that dream into practice. And I think that dream cannot be abandoned. We have to pursue it and pursue it in realistic terms. I see that India can do it. And India must do it.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I finished with LSE, Laski, of his own, gave me a letter of introduction for Panditji. On reaching Delhi I sought an appointment with the PM. I suppose, because I was an Indian student returning home from London, I was given a time-slot. It was here in Parliament House that he met me. We talked for a few minutes about London and things like that and I could soon see that it was time for me to leave. So I said goodbye and as I left the room I handed over the letter from Laski, and stepped out into the great circular corridor outside. When I was half way round, I heard the sound of someone clapping from the direction I had just come. I turned to see Panditji (Nehru) beckoning me to come back. He had opened the letter as I left his room and read it. [Nehru asked:] "Why didn't you give this to me earlier?" [and I replied:] "Well, sir, I am sorry. I thought it would be enough if I just handed it over while leaving." After a few more questions, he asked me to see him again and very soon I found myself entering the Indian Foreign Service.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: Gopal Gandhi Of a Certain Age: Twenty Life Sketches, Penguin Books India, 2011, p. 178
“The applications of science are inevitable and unquotable for all countries and people today. But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous, and critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the too many scientists today, who swear by science, forget all about it outside their particular sphere. The scientific approach and temper or should be a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting, associating, with our fellow men. That is a large order and undoubtedly very few if any at all can function in this way with even partial success. But his [Nehru] criticism applies in equal or even greater measure to all the injunctions which philosophy and religion have laid upon us. The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel. It is the temper of a free man. We live in a scientific age, so we are told but there is little evidence of this temper in the people anywhere or even in their leaders.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from his book “In Nehru and His Vision 1999" in: K.K. Sinha, Social And Cultural Ethos Of India, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1 January 2008, p. 183
“In such a globalised world society there would be no place for war, for hegemonistic controls or cut-throat competition. India, is a country that has wrested its independence from one of the mightiest empires on earth by the method of non-violence. It is not the desire of this nation to solve such problems as we have with our neighbours by the use of force. With Pakistan, which was carved out of our body-politic, it was our desire to have friendly co-operation in a hundred ways after partition. But if India`s integrity and independence is threatened, it becomes the duty of the Indian State, -- its duty to the one-billion people who inhabit our vast land -- to defend them with all the resources and strength at its disposal...”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Press Information Bureau in: Speech By The President Shri K.R. Narayanan At The Banquet In Honour Of H.E. Mr. William J. Clinton President Of The United States Of America, Press Information Bureau, 21 March 2000
“Nehru's great passion was to change our society — the congealed society which we inherited from our own past, and from the static past of the British period. And, social change he connected with economic change. We could not change our society without changing our economic system and economic relations in society. His whole dream was that, his whole effort was in that direction. But the march of society, of social change has not been fast enough, nor fundamental enough so far. And, our inherited caste system remains with us, but it has been very badly battered. And, the conceptions behind the caste system have also been very badly damaged by policies, by the march of technology and economics, all these things. To some extent while this progressive movement was taking place, there was also, concurrently, some sort of counter-revolution, resisting it. But the overwhelming force of the progressive movement has been winning by and large. But now we have to specifically deal with many of the social ills and backwardness.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Strength of our culture to some extent has compensated the lack of formal education. That is how people could vote wisely in these massive elections. After all, it was the ordinary, illiterate people who exercised the votes in the general elections we have had. And they seem to have voted with sufficient knowledge of affairs, of their interests, and this is remarkable indeed. But that is no substitute for education, and we have to have a full formal education for all our people and what I find sad is that it is an eminently practicable thing to do; in a matter of 5 years, India could be made literate.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By some mysterious reason, there is no difficulty for a man in illtreating a woman, and this is something amazing. Everybody loves his mother, sisters and relatives etc, but still, with all this there is this callous attitude and ill-treatment of women. So women's movements are necessary. One thing which is forgotten in India is the transformation of the attitude of men. It is in this field that active work has to be done. We all preach to women that they should assert themselves. But on the other hand we don't tell sufficient early, strongly, to the male that they should behave well, their attitude should change. I have no doubt that even the women's reservation [bill] will be finally adopted.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Economic liberalisation is a world phenomenon. Socialist countries, capitalist countries, all of them, have to take to liberalisation. The liberalisation took place first in Britain, then in the United States under President Reagan, these were not liberalising from a socialist system. I think it is because of the stage of economy which the world has reached at present and the stage of technology. At every historical and technological and economic age there are policies which would be suitable for that period and countries. We have to adopt policies, dictated by the circumstances and the necessities of the time.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We in India, as a result of our planned economic development, not central planning, but mixed planning, mixed economy, we have experimented with, we have moved to a stage of partial maturity of the economy, when we needed new forms of management, new forms of, expression of the spirit of enterprise, so that the economy can move forward. The compulsion to liberalisation and globalisation arose from this. This is why we say that India's liberalisation is an irreversible process....and, in a vast country, with millions of people and poverty, rampant, we cannot liberalise recklessly, in such a way that the balance of the society is upset and while some sections would flourish, make profits, the rest of the people would be left without employment and be helpless. Therefore, we have to have a balanced approach to liberalisation and also to globalisation.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...when we became independent and Nehru spelt out his vision, we appeared to be the leader, we are the only country which articulated the aspirations of Asia as a whole for the first time. Then other countries, small countries, big countries have come up asserting themselves, and, but still we are, because of our economic development, everybody knows that India is geographically a big central chunk of Asia and that it is an expanding economy. It is a technologically progressing society and in every field it is making a mark. And everybody recognises this role of India, but I think we have to articulate our position in Asia, in a new way, in a new set of circumstances that would appeal to everybody.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My image of a President before I came here, and before I had any hope of coming here, was that of a rubber-stamp President, to be frank. This is the image I got. But having come here, I find that the image is not quite correct. I thought, I will have lot of time, leisure for reading, writing, waking etc. But somehow I find I can't get it now. So, my image of a President is of a working President, not an executive President, but a working President, and working within the four corners of the Constitution. It gives very little direct power or influence to him to interfere in matters or affect the course of events, but there is a subtle influence of the office of the President on the executive and the arms of the government and on the public as a whole. It is a position which has to be used with the, what I should say, with a philosophy of indirect approach.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are one or two things, which you can directly do in very critical times. But otherwise, this indirect influence that you can exercise on the affairs of the State is the most important role he can play. And, he can play it successfully only if he is, his ideas and his nature of functioning are seen by the public in tune with their standards. The President has to be a citizen and there must be some equation between the people and the President, and if some advice or something is to be given to the executive, it would be received with grace, it would be sometimes accepted, if it is known that the public opinion is on the side of the kind of advice the President is giving. Otherwise, he cannot exercise much influence.”
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source