Paradox of power: The incredibly shrunken Suu Kyi

The voice of morality is a strange thing. The farther you are from the pedestal of power, the more forceful it is. But with every step that you take closer to that epicenter of power, it loses its stridency – and you’re seen as a mere shadow of the moral giant that you once were. Exhibit A to establish this paradox of power is Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader of Myanmar, who faced house arrest by the country’s military rulers for nearly two decades, but has since her release two years ago been working alongside her erstwhile captors and hopes someday to come to power with their help. When she was under house arrest, and even soon after her release, Suu Kyi saw the world in black-and-white terms. As the pro-democracy leader who enjoyed the undiluted support of the ordinary people of Myanmar, she saw the military in stark us-versus-them terms, and any foreign power that even tacitly cooperated with them appeared to have fallen in her estimation.[caption id=“attachment_661042” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Aung San Suu Kyi. AP[/caption] In fact, soon after her release, she even expressed her “sadness” with India for having coddled the Myanmar military junta, which had robbed her of her election victory in 1990 and had jailed her. As Firstpost had noted at that time ( here ), India’s relations with Myanmar were determined by its own strategic calculations. WikiLeaks documents from 2007 revealed that Mohan Kumar, an official in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, told US diplomats, who were pushing India to scale back its engagement with the junta: the GOI’s current policy of engagement with Burma was absolutely necessary as “The Ulfa guys hiding in Burma are screwing the hell out of us!” “Burma is the only one helping us.” But Suu Kyi, who was then standing tall on the moral pedestal and had near saintly status, had little sympathy for such cynical geopolical calculations. Even during a visit to India last year, she returned to that same theme, noting that she had been saddened by India’s dalliance with the military government. But barely a year after entering mainstream politics and being elected to Parliament, Suu Kyi is perhaps beginning to see the world less in bichromatic terms, and acknowledging shades of grey. But in so doing, she has fallen in the esteem of her own supporters, particularly those who had hoped that her participation in politics would spur the numerous people’s movements in Myanmar, which face brutal crackdown by the military. Just last week, Suu Kyi faced unlikely protests from the people of Monya township in northwest Myanmar for speaking up in support of a Chinese-owned copper mine project that the local community wants halted, for which they faced a brutal police crackdown last year ( more here). Suu Kyi headed a commission to investigate that violence, but her report didn’t sound anything like her own voice of morality of a few years ago. Instead, she endorsed continued operation of the mine, and urged the local community to give up its protests. The report of the commission headed by Suu Kyi acknowledged that the mine would lead to environmental damage and create only a few jobs for the locals. Yet, it said, mining operations should continue because scrapping the expansion could add to tension with China. Strikingly, it did not recommend any punishment for the police officials involved in the crackdown. As one of the protestors at the village said, “We feel that Daw Suu doesn’t have sympathy for us. We are fighting for the truth.” Which shows just how much Suu Kyi, the erstwhile people’s hero, has shrunken in the space of a year in parliamentary politics - and become more like the India she had been “saddened” by… Nor is this the first time that Suu Kyi is facing criticism from her people for the political compromises she has had to make with her erstwhile captors. In January, Suu Kyi courted controversy by expressing her “fondness” for the military. “People don’t like me for saying that,” she told the BBC ( here). “There are many who have criticised me for being what they call a poster girl for the army… but I think the truth is I am very fond of the army, because I always thought of it as my father’s army.” Such comments, coming from someone who was once perceived as a human rights champion, and articulated at precisely the time when the army was carrying out extensive airstrikes on rebels in the border areas, dismayed her supporters. Even earlier, Suu Kyi drew criticism from international human rights campaigners for her failure to give voice to her conscience and for taking a morally ambiguous line in respect of developments in her Myanmar, particularly the killing and displacement of Rohingyas in western Myanmar, and the Myanmar military offensive against the Kachin community. Her critics within Myanmar reckon that proximity to power—and the prospect of attaining more such power—has shrunken Suu Kyi. “Some of her harshest critics say her refusal to take on the military establishment is all about politics, and her ambitions for higher office,” reports the New York Times (here). “She’s only thinking about becoming president of Burma,” said Pu Zo Zam, a leading voice of the country’s minority groups. “She was a national hero for us. Now she’s only talking on behalf of her party.” All this, of course, plays entirely by the script. In fact, _Firstpost_ had noted earlier that: “It’s … a fair bet that were Suu Kyi to become a democratically elected leader of Myanmar today, she too would likely be sucked into the downward spiral of cynical geopolitics of the kind that she derides India for today.” In that sense, the morally shrunken Suu Kyi only demonstrates the paradox of power. Only dispossessed leaders of democratic movements can enjoy the luxury of the voice of morality in today’s world. And Suu Kyi has come a long way from those days when she could do no wrong.