UN remains indispensable; needs to be more representative, responsive: Shashi Tharoor

New Delhi/Cape Town: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has said the UN remains indispensable even in the face of its "failures" over Gaza and Ukraine, asserting that the world body's challenge is to become more representative and responsive in a world that needs principled global cooperation more than ever.

Tharoor, who has served as the UN under secretary general in the past, said on Thursday that to abandon the United Nations would be to abandon the very idea of common humanity.

"We need to recommit ourselves to the UN. As someone who served the UN for three decades from 1978-2007, I witnessed first-hand its evolution from a Cold War battleground to a post-Cold War laboratory of global cooperation," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said, delivering the 15th Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture in Cape Town, South Africa.

"I was part of its efforts to protect refugees and its struggles to build peace. I saw the UN falter in Rwanda, rise to the occasion in Timor-Leste and Namibia. I saw it struggle with bureaucracy and politics, yet persist in its mission to feed the hungry, shelter the displaced and give voice to the voiceless," Tharoor said.

"Today, when people decry its failures over Gaza and Ukraine, I acknowledge again that the UN is not perfect nor was it ever meant to be, and yet it remains indispensable," he said.

As someone who spent much of his adult life in its service, Tharoor said he remains convinced that the UN matters.

It matters to the refugees seeking shelter, to the peacekeepers standing guard, and to the diplomat negotiating a fragile truce, the former Minister of State for External Affairs said.

"It matters to all of us who believe that cooperation is not weakness and that justice is not luxury. The UN remains an indispensable symbol of not perfection but of possibility, as (former UN Secretary General) Dag Hammarskjöld so memorably said, 'it was not meant to take mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell'," Tharoor stated.

In the aftermath of its 80th anniversary last month, the UN's challenge is to become more representative, more responsive and resilient in a world that needs principled global cooperation more than ever, he said.

"To abandon it would be to abandon the very idea of our common humanity. Our own survival and that of the only universal world organisation we have - the UN - depends not on nostalgia but on renewal, and that renewal begins with the recognition that in an interconnected world, no nation is truly sovereign unless all are," Tharoor said.

It is time for that moral reimagination of the UN, he added.

Tharoor also called for replacing tolerance with acceptance and cited the words and vision of Swami Vivekananda.

"I am a Hindu and I learn from the great preacher Swami Vivekananda, who took Hinduism to the world of the late 19th century, that Hinduism stands for both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, he (Vivekananda) spoke but we also accept all religions as true. This was a profound insight, and that too in the late Victorian era," Tharoor said.

"I, after all, went to school in India, studied history, and learnt that tolerance is a virtue, that a tolerant king is a good king because he allows you to believe what he doesn't believe in. But in fact, Vivekananda was telling us that tolerance is a patronising idea. It is saying that 'I have the truth', but I will magnanimously indulge in your right to be wrong'," he said.

What Vivekananda taught Hindus is that we must replace tolerance with acceptance, Tharoor said.

"That is, we must say, 'I believe I have the truth, you believe you have the truth. I will respect your truth, please respect my truth'," he said.

In that, there is a great recipe for human and inter-religious co-existence, Tharoor said.

"His (Vivekananda's) vision was summarised in the credo 'Sarva dharma sambhav'...all religions are equal. Yet too often religion is reduced to boundary-making, to identity politics, to tribalism. We forget that the word religion comes from the word religare - to bound together," he said.

Tharoor said the vision of Archbishop Tutu demands that people reject the false choice between peace and justice and insist on both, recognising that healing requires truth and that truth requires courage.

He said the vision demands that "we listen to the silenced, listen to the stories of survivors, listen to the victims of terror and not those who clamour their cause in its name, that we dismantle the systems - legal economic, ideological - that perpetuate inequality and exclusions, that we challenge the structures that exclude and clamour to change them into places of inclusion, and above all it demands that we reclaim hope." In a world driven by war and terrorism, by climate collapse and mass displacement, by rising authoritarianism, hostility and xenophobia, it is easy to despair, but despair is a luxury we cannot afford, Tharoor asserted.

Ending with a call to action, he said, "Let us be the generation that refused to be divided by fear or hatred, let us be the citizens who speak truth even when it trembles in our throats, the believers of every faith and those who chose love over hatred, justice over vengeance, courage over comfort, principles over the uneasy compromises of pragmatism." "Let us be the builders of bridges, the architects of inclusiveness, the healers of wounds, the promoters of hope, the ones that held aloft the flickering flame of hope and faith even in the midst of intensifying darkness, for the world does not need more cynics, it needs more Tutus and more Tutu-like souls," Tharoor said.

Tharoor noted that the gathering was taking place in the shadow of deepening global polarisation and amid conflicts that fracture communities and ideologies that harden hearts.

"And yet in this moment of uncertainty, we invoke the name of a man whose life was a luminous testament to the power of moral courage, prophetic witness and radical compassion, Desmond Tutu," he said.

In a moment of religious strife and xenophobic conflict, we need faith that unites rather than divides, he said.

"Desmond Tutu did not just speak these truths, he lived them and in doing so he not just left us a legacy but a challenge, a challenge to re-imagine coexistence, to build peace not in the absence of conflict but in the presence of justice, to see in every stranger a reflection of ourselves," Tharoor said.

He urged people to resolve to carry forward the torch that Tutu lit.

Desmond Tutu was a South African Anglican bishop, known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist.