My vision of free India is of a country free from the fear of war, want and exploitation, and where mass poverty, ignorance and disease which afflict millions of our people today will be a thing of the past.
Freedom from the fear of war means that, while not neglecting our national security, we must collaborate actively with likeminded nations to promote the culture of peace and world disarmament.
Freedom from want and exploitation requires a strong commitment to sustainable and equitable social and economic development, paying particular attention to the protection of our environment and the uplift of marginalized communities, especially women and children.
To achieve our objectives, India must firmly reject the politics of exclusion, a politics which seeks to exploit religious and caste difference for narrow partisan ends. We must never allow the type of carnage recently witnessed in Gujarat to reoccur ever again.
My idea of free India is best summed up in the famous poem of Rabindra Nath Tagore:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

—Dr. Manmohan Singh