The same kind of people who made her a saint,
now defame her. It is a reminder that we must not overly respect the opinions
of the global elite about local affairs
By Manu Joseph @manujosephsan
About eight years ago, by some miscalculation, the
upmarket Hay Festival came to Thiruvananthapuram. Western and Westernized
writers were at first gladdened by the packed main hall but then they soon
realized that the audience mostly stared with blank faces and did not react at
all to the wisdom and subtle wit of the thinkers. Something about the global
sophistication of the speakers was lost upon the literate but deeply local
children-of-the-soil Malayalis. Sometimes the weight of honesty in the air can
be disastrous for a posh literature festival. But then a young white woman, who
was one of the volunteers and not an invited thinker, came to the podium and
said, her voice choking with emotion, and tears welling in her eyes, that she
had just heard the most wonderful news. Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been under
house arrest in Burma (now Myanmar) for 15 years over a period of 21 years, had
been released by her nation’s reigning military. The Malayali crowd, finally,
was moved by something that was said on the stage. There was applause.
I tried to understand the moment. How did it come to be
that parotta eaters and the asparagus-eaters were united by the news about an
affluent upper-class Burmese lady? Even though writers project intellectual
unity as a virtue and polarization as a disease, the fact is that often a
uniform opinion across social classes is a sign that one class has conned the
rest, and polarization is a sign that the provincial are liberating themselves
from the colonization of global scholars.
Humans are fundamentally virtuous, but then they adopt a
hierarchy of virtues, and it is the hierarchy that separates us. Suu Kyi was
then among the very few people in the world who could bring together people of
distinct virtue hierarchies. Her global reputation was at its peak those days;
now it is in tatters. This month she defended a Myanmar court’s handing out
seven-year jail sentences to two reporters of Reuters, who were at the time of
their arrests working on a story on the role of the Burmese State in the murder
of Rohingya Muslims. Earlier, when pressured by an American diplomat for their
release, she had even called the journalists traitors. The mascot of Western
values was now behaving like a third-world dictator. Journalists across the
world, who had once contributed to her legend, tweeted their disgust. They
didn’t ask themselves why they had been wrong about her, and how they will
ensure that they do not create such global myths again. Instead they appeared
to convey that they are better human beings than Suu Kyi.
For many months now there has been pressure on her to
make some humane statements against the atrocities of her government against
the minority Muslim population. The most sanctimonious from the disgusted
global elite have asked for the revocation of one of its most coveted
good-behaviour awards—the Nobel Peace Prize.
But Suu Kyi has not yielded. She is not a mere activist
now. She is a politician, and a part of the government, and she does not wish
to do anything to upset her constituency—the majority Bamars. She has done a
political triage, and she knows she should let go of the Muslims and appease
the majority. She knows her effigies are now burning, but outside her land. She
has more at stake in her own nation than the foreigners who are offering her
moral advice. Is it possible that she is indeed a saint, and that she cares
deeply about the Muslims in her land but feels that her humanitarian posturing
will not help them even as it destroys her popularity among the majority? Or,
maybe, she is a communal racist who always had secret majoritarian views. In
either case, what emerges is that the propensity of the pious global elite to
canonize or defame public figures in cultures and circumstances it does not
comprehend is a morally spurious enterprise.
The global liberal elite had built the Suu Kyi myth in
its own image. She was of good stock, she went to Oxford, spoke with a British
accent, she was refined, classy, beautiful. She spoke of such fabulous European
inventions like human rights and democracy. The world loved her. At least one
American admirer travelled to Rangoon (now Yangon), and swam in stealth across
a lake to meet her. She was rewarded in more sane and substantial ways for being
an excellent ambassador of Western values. One evening, in 1991, she had heard
the news of her Nobel Peace Prize on the radio.
When she accepted the award, in 2012, she played along.
In an exquisite Nobel lecture, she said the award should remind us of, “the
oneness of humanity”. She recalled the six great human miseries as mentioned in
Buddhist texts—“to be conceived, to age, to sicken, to die, to be parted from
those one loves, to be forced to live in propinquity with those one does not
love.” She said that human suffering was inescapable, so the role of
reformation was not to end suffering but to reduce it. She said she derived her
strength to fight the Burmese military junta from the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights by the United Nations. She quoted some parts, “...disregard and
contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of mankind...” and she said, “human rights should be protected
by the rule of law.”
This is exactly what she refuses to do now. When she was
an activist she did not have to reveal the full spectrum of her personality.
Now that she is a local politician, who is far more useful to her people than
when she was as a venerable puppet of the West, she is assuming a different
public image—an upper caste Bamar feudal lady who is pained not by human
suffering but by the loss of her social status. In response to the calls from
intellectuals to revoke her Nobel, Gunnar Stålsett, a former member of the
Nobel committee, which is always entirely made up of Norwegian citizens,
observed, “The principle we follow is the decision is not a declaration of a
saint. When the decision has been made and the award has been given, that ends
the responsibility of the committee.”
It is not the Nobel of Aung San Syu Kyi that has to be
revoked, but the morally indefensible right of Western committees to assume
they know enough to decide whom the world must look up to.
The author Manu Joseph is a
journalist and a novelist, most recently of Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous.