The Hindu Huddle 2025: Ranil Wickremesinghe moots idea of India taking a lead in ensuring emergence of South Asia as most powerful region

Ranil Wickremesinghe moots idea of India taking a lead in ensuring emergence of South Asia as most powerful region

Maintaining that “regionalism” is going to be important in the emerging world order, former president and prime minister of Sri Lanka Ranil Wickremesinghe has mooted the idea of India taking a lead in ensuring the emergence of South Asia as the “most powerful region”.

Participating in a session titled ‘In the hood: The new forces shaping subcontinental geopolitics’ at the fifth edition of The Hindu Huddle organised by The Hindu Group, in Bengaluru, Mr. Wickremesinghe observed that the South Asian region would account for a population size of 2.7 billion in the total world population of 9.8 billion while its combined economy would be around 43 billion dollars.

“You will have three nuclear powers in this region. This is going to be the most powerful region in the world,” he said, while adding a rider that: “We can do so if get out of the traditional mindset.”

The former Sri Lankan president said geopolitics was witnessing a great shift, while pointing out, “We had a unipolar world at the end of the World War-II that later became bipolar (with USSR and US being major players) and then unipolar again. It is becoming bipolar again (with US and China being the major players).” He wondered if it could become tripolr by 2050 where US, China and India would be the major players, particularly with India expected to be the third biggest economy by then.

Mr. Wickremesinghe observed that the South Asian region would be a larger commonwealth than British commonwealth and it had several common threads in terms of religion, culture, civilisation, literature and philosophy among other things.

Referring to the present global scenario, he said: “We are seeing a world in which US President Donald Trump has disrupted the WTO. He has challenged the global order made by the US itself. It is like a cat eating the kitten. We all look upto the US as the growth engine. But it is shaken now. So regionalism is going to be more and more important, he said, while stressing the need for emergence of South Asia as the powerful region under the leadership of India.

Referring to the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, he argued that the transformation of economy should go on even amidst such issues. “Development should go on despite terrorism as it is a phenomenon we need to live with,” he said.