Anyone who believes in the transmigration of souls might be forgiven for thinking that the spirit of the late Benazir Bhutto has been reincarnated in another Daughter of the East: Aung San Suu Kyi. No two female leaders in this region share such telling similarities. Not the Sri Lankan Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike nor her offspring daughter Mrs Chandrika Kumaratunga, not India’s Mrs Indira Gandhi, nor her daughter-in-law Mrs Sonia Gandhi, not the Bangladeshi Sheikh Hasina nor her nemesis Khaleda Zia.
Most of them were either widows or daughters of martyrs. Each of them has had to pay that cruel admission fee to enter a political arena in which the gladiators are men. Unlike their sisters in arms, Benazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi (the Burmese call her Daw Suu) had to suffer years of unconscionable imprisonment. Both survived debilitating years in exile (Benazir Bhutto outside Pakistan, Aung San Suu Kyi within Myanmar).
Both, nourished over the years by the droplets of continuous support from their followers, gradually crystallised into fragile stalagmites of democracy.
And, finally, when allowed by generals to contest in a general election, both campaigned tirelessly, won with commanding majorities, but then found power denied them by a military junta. To gain what was rightfully theirs, they had to agree on an unworkable compromise which left them sandwiched between a khaki-minded president above and a khaki-uniformed army chief below.
It must be galling for Daw Suu as it was for Ms Bhutto to be conjoined to the military, to be treated as a weak supplicant, just as it cannot be easy for any democratically elected leader to accept that the ballot paper, in dexterous hands, can be folded like some malleable origami into a bullet. (Courtesy of Dhaka Tribune)
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