The final point I want to take from Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nehru Lecture is simple. Noting that fraternal ties developed by anti-colonial movements in Burma and India in the 1930s were loosened in the early 1940s when Burmese patriots, led by her father, diverged from Gandhi’s path of non-violence, she describes one of the postwar occasions when links were rebuilt. This was an address of welcome delivered by Aung San at a reception for Sarat Chandra Bose, elder brother of Indian nationalist leader Subheads Chandra Bose, at Rangoon City Hall on July 24, 1946. The Bogyoke considered it sufficiently important to include in a booklet of speeches brought together that same month under the title Burma’s Challenge.

In his oration, Aung San sketched a vision of regional unity that remains interesting 70 years on. Reflecting Britain’s still unfinished imperial adventure, he placed Burma in a South Asian rather than Southeast Asian orbit – in 1946, of course, India comprised almost all of today’s South Asia, including Bangladesh and Pakistan. Surely conscious of inter-communal tension in Burma during the preceding decade, he nevertheless looked forward to a period of harmony between peoples he unhesitatingly identified as distinct races. In the original speech, rather than the excerpted passage used by Aung San Suu Kyi, he held that “our policy towards India and Indians in Burma is one of the broadest conception and generosity”. He continued with a ringing statement:

“We have no axe to grind, we nurture no feelings of racial bitterness and ill will. We stand for friendly relations with any and every nation in the world. Above all, and after all, we stand for more than friendly relations with our neighbours. We want to be not merely good neighbours, but good brothers even, the moment such course should become possible. We stand for an Asiatic Federation in a not very, very remote future, we stand for immediate mutual understanding and joint action, wherever and whenever possible, from now for our mutual interests and for the freedom of India, Burma and indeed all Asia. We stand for these, and we trust Indian national leaders in India implicitly.”