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Suu Kyi in Naypyidaw on Thursday. (AFP)
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New Delhi, Oct. 18: Myanmar’s Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will visit India in the second week of November to deliver the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial lecture.
Sources in Delhi say her decision to visit India has more to do with old time’s sake than with making Indian leaders change their “pragmatic” foreign policy regarding Myanmar.
Suu Kyi’s father Aung San shared a deep friendship with India’s first Prime Minister.
Suu Kyi hasn’t made any secret of her “disappointment” with Delhi’s policy. From the early 2000s, Delhi had jettisoned its support for the Suu Kyi-led pro-democracy movement in an effort to build bridges with Myanmar’s military rulers, fearing it had ceded too much ground to Beijing.
But it is her father’s friendship with Nehru, the sources said, that has influenced her decision.
In June, in an address to both Houses of the British Parliament, Suu Kyi said her father’s most famous photograph taken outside 10 Downing Street in 1947 shows him wearing a large British overcoat that was given to him by Nehru to “protect him” against the “unaccustomed” cold.
“And I must say that having not left my tropical country for 24 years, there have been odd moments when I’ve thought of that coat,” she said.
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