Change is in the air. Not just in Goa but all over the world. And though we often evoke spring and springtime in this connection, I’m not referring to climatic change, ominous as it is. I’m talking about the change that inspires hope, and hope that triggers change. It may be called a virtuous circle. It is a theme in keeping with the Easter season and the prolonged season for change that started with the Arab spring.
The latest results have come from Myanmar, where Nobel peace prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, has won forty-three parliamentary seats in by-elections held for forty-five. About eighteen months back, Wang Dan, a Chinese leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement, had described her in an essay in Time magazine as a lady called Hope. This was after her release from the in and out house arrest by the military junta, lasting for over two decades. He had called her “a symbol to those … fighting for human rights against authoritarian regimes”.
She was placed under house arrest in 1989, during another time of hope inducing change. Nelson Mandela, the political prisoner of the century, was about to be released. The Berlin wall was about to fall. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was falling apart after Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost. Communism was crumbling under its own suffocating weight. Poland had shown the way by saying goodbye to communism, and other East European nations were soon to follow. We Indians had shown the door to the Congress for a second time, under the leadership of V. P. Singh. Change was in the air all over. But in China it was the massacre of students fighting for change at the Tiananmen Square. In Burma, now Myanmar, it was the house arrest of a great leader in the making, the daughter of General Aung San, hero of their country’s independence more or less at the same time as that of our own in 1947. Aung San Suu Kyi’s physical movements and activities were confined, but her spirit soared beyond boundaries. No power on earth has authority over one’s spirit. Quoting Suu Kyi,“the only real prison is fear; and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”.
The Nobel prize for peace made her an international celebrity in 1991. The people of her country placed their trust and hope in her. To the outside world she became the “moral imprimatur”. And to all, inside and outside, she became an icon of democracy. Be it in victory or defeat, she is the symbol of courage and change. Says she in an interview published in Time, “my very top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.”
Change is not easy. Those leading the people towards change need to be men and women of tremendous courage, matched by an iron will power. They have to be self sacrificing and morally upright. Suu Kyi has proved herself to be having all the qualities of a great leader, with her resistance as well as persistence. Her stature can’t be contained in a title.
But then stature alone does not suffice. A leader has to have the humility to be in touch with reality, and also subject oneself to change based on realistic assessment. Not a change of principles but a change in functioning. As Mahatma Gandhi would say, be the change you want to bring about.
Suu Kyi has, specially in the last two years, shown herself to be pragmatic. Her present victory is also to be attributed to her pragmatism in engaging with the reformist President of Myanmar, Thein Sein. Her party, the National League for Democracy, will now occupy forty-three seats in a house of six hundred sixty-four. The landslide victory of forty-three out of forty-five seats indicates great future possibilities, specially in general elections due in Myanmar in 2015.
Suu Kyi has stated that she would prefer to work as a member of parliament, to which she is elected, than accept a role in the army backed government, which requires her to give up the parliament seat. This decision is another feat of pragmatism to keep a proper balance between the people whose face of hope she is and the government whose face of democratic legitimacy she could be.
I wish her the very best. She has to meet the challenges of a country, rich in energy and mineral resources but with poverty and ethnic problems. Myanmar needs her as a leader. The world needs her as an inspiration.
Published in The Navhind Times, Panorama 08.04.2012
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