AUNG SAN Suu Kyi, Burma’s (also known as Myanmar) pro-democracy leader, has criticised India for conducting business with her country’s military junta which jailed her for almost 15 years. She called for talks with New Delhi at the earliest opportunity.
"I am saddened with India. I would like to have thought that India would be standing behind us. That it would have followed in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (free India's first prime minister)", Ms Suu Kyi told the Indian Expressnewspaper in a telephone interview from the capital Rangoon (now known as Yangon) published yesterday.
The 65-year-old Nobel laureate said she would like India to remember that the neighbours had been through “thick and thin together” in fighting colonialism and hoped Delhi would also talk to her National League for Democracy party, which won Burma’s 1990 election but was not allowed to assume office by the military.
“It is now time to maintain steady in that direction [democracy] and encourage a valuable friendship,” she said 11 days after being released from house detention. “We would like India to work closely with us,” said Ms Suu Kyi, who graduated from a popular girls’ college in Delhi where she lived with her mother who was the Burmese ambassador.
Thereafter, along with her husband, the late Michael Aris – a scholar in Tibetan and Bhutanese studies whom she met at Oxford – she also lived in the former imperial summer capital Simla, 350km north of Delhi. She returned to Burma in 1988 shortly after which she was incarcerated for opposing the military.
India was once a staunch Suu Kyi supporter but deliberately dropped her cause in the mid-1990s and began engaging with Burma’s military regime over security and energy issues.
It sought and received Burma’s help in neutralising insurgent groups hiding in its jungles but operating in India’s adjoining northeastern provinces.
Delhi has also been eyeing Burma’s oil and gas reserves to fuel its economic development but above all is anxious to counter China’s proliferating security, economic and military influence in that country.
In its quest to become a major naval power China is seeking access to the Indian Ocean via Burma by investing heavily in numerous projects such as building ports and bolstering the military junta with material. It is also building a twin set of pipelines to transport oil and gas into China, triggering fears in India of “encirclement” by Beijing’s growing web of alliances with all its neighbours.