The second part of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nehru Lecture that interests me again plays off an episode from the life of the legendary Indian statesman. The time is the early 1960s. The place is Delhi Railway Station, where various dignitaries have assembled to greet a train bearing Burmese Prime Minister U Nu on an official visit. Among them are Aung San Suu Kyi, aged roughly 16, her mother Khin Kyi, then Burmese Ambassador to India, and Nehru, still both Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs. It is the earliest recollection Aung San Suu Kyi has of seeing him. Noting that cheers went up as soon as the teeming crowd spotted the Indian premier entering the cordoned area, she reports his reaction.

“His lower lip protruding in that famous petulant look, Nehru ignored all the plaudits and all the people (including me) and walked up and down the empty platform with my mother and talked to her exclusively. His aristocratic disdain for public approbation filled me with both astonishment and admiration. I wondered if Nehru’s public liked his cool arrogance or whether there was a bond between them that made exchanges of mutual courtesies unnecessary. Then I remembered that my father had been notorious for his stern, almost scowling expression and for his lack of social graces. Our people loved him for these very defects, which they saw as proof of his honest, open nature. I should add that towards the end of his life my father acknowledged that as a national leader, he could not continue with the rough diamond manners of a young revolutionary.”

Like Nehru, Aung San Suu Kyi is of course a political aristocrat. Clearly she has none of the disdain for popular acclaim that she marveled at in him. Nor does she follow her father in lacking social graces or, as she put it in her short 1984 biography of him, in displaying “altogether angular behavior”. Nevertheless, there is an element of nobility and aloofness to her bearing and, as with Aung San, her people appear to read into that a basic honesty for which they love her.

Equally, though, such qualities surely contribute to a certain deficiency when it comes to institution building. This is something that has been noted of her role as party leader, and that could become an issue if ever she were to assume a senior position in government.