Nobel laureate has let the world down

By K. Natwar Singh

Aung San Suu Kyi is a legendary figure, admired, adored, respected and venerated. She is an icon. Her life is a saga of tragedy. Her father Aung San was assassinated when she was two. He was 35. At the time of his death, he was on the verge of becoming the founding Prime Minister of Independent Burma. Her mother, Dow Khin Kyi was Burma’s ambassador to India for several years. Suu Kyi spent most of her childhood in New Delhi. She spent some time at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, where she wrote, “Burma and India: Some Aspects of Intellectual Life Under Colonialism”. At Oxford, she met Michael Aris, a scholar and later they married.

In the mid-nineties the Jury of the Nehru Memorial Fund awarded her the Jawaharlal Nehru Prize. She was in jail. I flew to Oxford to see her husband asking if she would accept the award. He said she would.

Let us now come to the Rohingya crisis her country is facing. As the virtual prime minister of Myanmar, she has shown insensitivity and incompetence. For an admired humanist, she has let the side down. It is now obvious that her administrative talents are limited. She seems out of her depth. Even a close friend like Karan Thapar had on September 14 wrote critically of her folly. He wrote, “It was inevitable that once Aung San Suu Kyi became Burma’s ruler and was no longer just a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had spent 15 years under house arrest, she would fall from the pedestal on which she had been placed. But her collapse is more than anyone could have envisaged.”

Her life is now in serious danger. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran has said, “….. have sounded the ‘death knell’ for the Nobel Laureate”.  Al-Qaida, not surprisingly, reacted threateningly and viciously. The sooner Suu Kyi changes course, the better for her. Her death would be searing tragedy. To martyrdom there exist other routes.

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Some days ago, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat spoke of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). He said even though many eminent personalities in the pre-Independence era were educated in the Macaulay education system, “they remained unaffected by western influence… The Macaulay system of education, which we say is a foreign education system of education, “had spawned personalities such as Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.” Obviously the distinguished RSS chief is a man of vast learning and deep understanding.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an imaginative innovator (I am writing about a limited sphere). By commencing a trend of taking his guests to Ahmedabad is praiseworthy. For decades, these worthies were dispatched to Agra, Bombay, Bengaluru and Chennai.

Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were aware of Mahatma Gandhi. That, I think was just about. For these eminences to spend some time at Sabarmati Ashram must have been an education combined with enlarging their vision of India. 

I have been to Sabarmati Ashram several times. It is a unique place. The Mahatma’s spirit seems to hover above to the ashram and the Sabarmati. Wardha is quite different. Its extreme austerity was not pleasing to the head or heart. Gandhiji was not an acetic. His lifestyle was. But he had not abandoned the world to become a sanyasi. In fact, he had little time for the tribe. Nevertheless, the choice of Wardha was, with due respect, somewhat eccentric. 

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I am a book lover. Deprived of books, I would be lost and miserable. If one reads, boredom is vanished. I always tell my friends to maintain a library. Mine is well-stocked. I dislike shopping. The only exception is book buying.

These are my 10 favourite books. 

I have read each several times: War and Peace by Tolstoy, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Les Miserables 

by Victor Hugo, Gitanjali by Tagore, The Story of My Experiments with Truth by MK Gandhi, An Autobiography by Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Godan by Munshi Prem Chand, Great Contemporaries by Winston Churchill and Howards End by EM Forster.