New Delhi, Nov 22: A UN Security Council (UNSC) without India as a permanent member is an "anachronism" as are bodies like the International monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Saturday and then added a caveat -- “with power comes responsibility”.
"A UNSC without India as a permanent member is an anachronism. An IMF or a World Bank without a proper role for India will no longer do," Blair said while addressing the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit here on ‘Leadership in a Globalised World’.
"India will demand and India will receive the position due to one of the world's major powers," he added.
Blair then sounded a word of caution.
"But, beware one thing -- with the power will come the responsibility. Of a sudden, you will find the expectation that you will, in partnership with others, lead the world; so you will be able to solve its problems.
"People will knock at your door not to give opinions, but to hear answers," Blair noted, adding, "It is an exciting prospect, but also a daunting one. Ask America, or increasingly, China."
Even so, Blair was optimistic that India would rise to the challenge.
"The world's largest democracy that over 60 years has come so far and done so much has a spring in its step. The poverty for millions remains. But those that have escaped it, and can lead others to do so, those who here and round the world are evidence of the dynamism, enterprise and ingenuity of the Indian people, show what the true spirit of India can do.”
"Such a spirit will design your future. And that future will shine bright," Blair noted.
He added that India and Britain need to move ahead and not live in the past.
"Neither of us can live in the past. In the eyes of the future, the old days of Britain are much less interesting than the new days of India," he said while addressing the summit.
Britain, too, was searching "for its place in these new times”, he added.
"Today, as the British come to terms with being a small island of 60 million people off mainland Europe; when we know that (in another 50 years) India and China will have bigger economies than Europe or America and each will have a population bigger than both combined, we must think our way through these times not with nostalgic regret but with unsentimental rigour,” Blair maintained.
He began his address on a nostalgic note, recalling that his "fascination and love" for India began not when he visited this "extraordinary and beautiful country" almost two decades ago but at Oxford, where an Indian postgraduate student shaped his first political thoughts "and planted the intellectual seeds that later grew into New Labour".
Pointing out that he had made it a "priority" of his premiership to “revitalise and renew the Britain-India relationship for the modern era", Blair added, "I am proud of the state of that relationship today.”
"And now, shorn of office, I have a new Indian connection. My youngest son Leo, aged 8, has a best friend whose father is Indian.”
"We stand, as we did the other morning, in the school playground waiting for the day's lessons to begin. He has educated Leo about cricket. He has bestowed on me a relentless and seemingly inexhaustible supply of Indian jokes.”
"I have an uneasy feeling these may be deeply, politically incorrect; so I won't repeat any," Blair said amidst much laughter.
IANS
First Published: Saturday, November 22, 2008, 00:00