Karan Thapar

The Lady I knew: Aung San Suu Kyi’s tragedy

Shakespeare’s tragedies have heroes but they are not heroic. As the plays unfold you witness their crumbling. In fact, they destroy themselves because the flaw is embedded deep in their character. It’s an inevitable and irresistible process. It’s an outcome that cannot be prevented. That’s why it’s tragic.

I think that could also be true of Aung San Suu Kyi. I’ve known her since I was five. At the time, her mother was the Burmese Ambassador in India, and Suu, as I have always called her, was an undergraduate at Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College. Our parents became friends and Suu and my sister Kiran would often drive together to college.

Even as a teenager, Suu was drawn to politics. She sensed her future would ultimately lie in ruling Burma (the name she prefers for Myanmar) and didn’t hide it even if she only spoke jocularly. A pencil-drawn portrait that she made of my sister Kiran, dated 11 October 1962, has inscribed at the bottom ‘Kiran Thapar may be allowed entry into Burma at any time’. Suu was only 17 at the time.

Years later her husband Michael told me at Oxford that when they married – and Suu was 27 at the time – she forewarned him that if Burma calls it would always be her priority. In fact, he sensed when she returned home in 1988 it was unlikely she would come back. She didn’t. They lived separately till he died. She was also cut off from her two young sons. Of the next 21 years she spent 15 either in jail or under house arrest.

Once admired, she was now reviled. Outside Burma she became a fallen angel

No doubt this hurt and she suffered, but politics and the determination to come to power in Burma was more than a mission. It was a calling.

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