India should take a lead in ensuring South Asia's emergence as the most powerful region: Ranil

Former Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has mooted the idea of India taking a lead in ensuring South Asia's emergence as the “most powerful region.”

- BY S VENKAT NARAYAN Our Special Correspondent

Maintaining that “regionalism” is going to be important in the emerging world order,

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 on Sunday, he observed that the South Asian region will account for a population size of 2.7 billion in the total world population of 9.8 billion while its combined economy will be around $43 trillion by 2050.

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

Wickremesinghe said geopolitics is witnessing a great shift: “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).”