India ready to play its part to meet global challenges: PM
September 24th, 2011 - 9:17 pm ICT by IANS
United Nations, Sep 24 (IANS) Calling upon the UN to once again embrace the principles of internationalism to meet global challenges from economic downturn to terrorism, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Saturday said India stands ready to play its part.
“We have no choice but to meet these challenges,” he reminded the UN General Assembly. “We will succeed if we adopt a cooperative rather than a confrontationist approach.”
“More importantly, we will succeed if our efforts have legitimacy and are pursued not just within the framework of law, but also the spirit of law,” Manmohan Singh said, asserting that actions taken under the authority of the UN “must respect the unity, territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of individual states”.
Among the key challenges facing the comity of nations, he identified a troubled world economy, terrorism, social and political upheaval in West Asia and North Africa, the still unresolved Palestinian question and iniquitous growth.
To address what he called the “deficit in global governance”, Manmohan Singh, amid applause, called for making the UN “stronger and more effective” with revitalisation of the UN General Assembly and reforms and expansion of the decision making Security Council to “reflect contemporary reality”.
He also called for pursuing the reform of governance systems of international institutions with “speed and efficiency”, saying “we should not allow the global economic slowdown to become a trigger for building walls around ourselves through protectionism or erecting barriers to movement of people, services and capital”.
Noting that nuclear proliferation continues to remain a threat to international security, Manmohan Singh said the “action plan put forward by (then) prime minister Rajiv Gandhi provides a concrete road map for achieving nuclear disarmament in a time bound, universal, non discriminatory, phased and verifiable manner”.
Expressing confidence that people’s faith in the charter and objectives of the United Nations “through statesmanship, foresight and collective efforts”, he declared “India stands ready to play its part in this noble endeavour”.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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