Chennai: The former British Prime Minister David Cameron renewed the call for India to become a member of the United Nations Security Council. In the course of the KS Narayanan centenary oration for which he made an eight-hour air dash to Chennai on Wednesday, the Tory leader said India was an example of the rise of great nations and that the world must learn to live with it. He was for the world to recognise this and work with the country so the world itself can benefit.
A strong votary of the Paris accord, Mr. Cameron said, “We cannot grow our industries and save the environment at the same time. If the sea levels rise only by a few centimetres, large parts of Chennai will be under water,” he warned.
Paying rich tribute to the Chennai industrialist KS Narayanan who built institutions with ethics, transparency and good business practices, the former British PM David Cameron spoke on “The new geopolitics” as his topic of the oration. He spelt out four areas the world had to pay attention to in order to be a better place.
The avid votary of globalisation may have agreed to the democratic practice of holding the referendum on whether to leave the EU and so inadvertently caused a sort of end of globalisation with the UK now looking at Brexit in any which way possible. But that has not made him change his stand even a bit. He does believe though that course corrections are needed to take along the people who have been left behind. “Education, skills and good wages will make that happen,” he said optimistically.
The rise of great nations is the other area the world needed to accept. “World trade is not a zero sum game,” he said while obviously hinting at Donald Trump's stand on the subject of tariffs and trade barriers. “The world must work with India,” Cameron said even as he took a swipe at the rise of strong leaders in which he named Vladimir Putin of Russia as a threat to democracy while pretending to believe in democracy.
Mr Cameron spoke out against terrorism, particularly of the Islamist brand of extremism, while pointing out that India and the UK had suffered much at the hands of terror. “We must tackle the ideologies that drive this, stress that there can be no place for hate in the mosques nor radicalism in the universities. Heaping praise on India's democratic secularism, he said the country was at the forefront of the fight against terror that cannot be allowed to flourish.
The fourth area Mr Cameron spoke about was climate change and how proud he was as British PM to be among the 196 signatories to the Paris accord. “We cannot grow our industries and save the environment at the same time. If the sea levels rise only by a few centimetres, large parts of Chennai will be under water,” he warned.
“The choices we make are more important,” Mr Cameron asserted as he pleaded for greater globalisation, acceptance of the rise of great nations like India and China, defeat of terror with sustained efforts at solid intelligence and muscular approach as much as showing how the most cherished democratic values are the best way forward and, finally, to arrest climate change with pro-active methods.
Mr Cameron may have been the unwitting architect of Brexit, although he was pro-EU and remains so, but he does believe that there is a sensible way for Britain to leave the EU as “friends and neighbours as we cannot change geography.” He believes Brexit can be good and bad for India.
