6 - From Exile to Elections

Summary

A spirit of resistance was impressed upon me from an early age by my parents. I had, of course, grown up with stories of how my father, former Prime Minister U Nu, General Aung San, and countless other Burmese patriots had fought against British and Japanese imperialism, and won independence for the nation. In my father's case, his long career in resistance started at the tender age of fourteen, when he was part of a group of villagers that had assembled to give some visiting British colonial officers a less-than-warm reception at the local docks. He was arrested for his part in this incident, the first of many sojourns in prison over the course of his life (Butwell 1965; U Nu 1975). I was fifteen years old when armed soldiers loyal to General Ne Win stormed into our house in Rangoon in the early hours of 2 March 1962. In order to avoid any violence, my parents did as they were told, and my father was led away to prison that night. As soon as the soldiers and tanks moved away from our house, however, my mother made sure my brothers and I went to school as though nothing had happened. This was her way of showing any who supported the military's actions that we were not cowed by the previous night's events, and that we had nothing to fear either.

As we all know, General Ne Win's actions on that night have had a deep and lasting effect on the course of modern Burmese history. In the years following my father's release from prison, in October 1966, we lived in exile, initially by the Thai-Burma border. It was during the five years spent at various rebel pro-democracy camps in these forests that I met my husband, U Aung Nyein, who was at the time an officer in the rebel army. At the invitation of the Government of India, my parents and I moved to Calcutta, and then to Bhopal. My parents were allowed to return permanently to Burma in 1980, and my husband and I settled down in New Delhi in the same year.

WORKING IN INDIA AND THE 1988 UPRISING

At the time of the 1988 student uprising in Burma, I was working as a translator-announcer in the Burmese Language Unit of All India Radio, the state-owned national radio service of India.