Myanmar: A pariah nation with lots of friends
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Aung San Suu Kyi has long proclaimed her love for India.
Myanmar's pro-democracy icon went to college in New Delhi, her mother was the ambassador there and she spent some of her happiest times with her late husband and two sons in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.
But India's government, she says, has been a disappointment.
"It saddens me," she said of New Delhi's ties to the army generals who run her country, also known as Burma. "It saddens my heart that the peoples of India and Burma, who went through the battles of independence as comrades to fight and get out from under the British empire, that the old ties have given way to the new ties of commercialism."
Things have changed since Ms Suu Kyi rose to prominence in the late 1980s, and India joined the clamorous international outcry against the military crackdown on the democracy movement.
On Tuesday, security and commerce are New Delhi's foremost concerns in Myanmar — echoing how realpolitik governs Yangon's relations with a string of powerful regional allies.
Myanmar's repressive government is cut off from much of the international community by travel restrictions on the elite and trade sanctions from many western countries. But the nation wedged between India, China and Thailand also has enormous energy reserves, thousands of miles of coastline and long borders that make it strategically important.
As a result: in its own neighbourhood, the pariah is pretty popular.
"Thailand, China, Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia," said Maung Zarni, an exiled dissident and research fellow at the London School of Economics, listing Yangon's regional allies. "All treat Burma as nothing more than a resource brothel and a strategic location for their national interests."
It is India, though, that Ms Suu Kyi has singled out — in her own quiet way — for criticism. "I would like to have thought India would be standing behind us," she told the Indian Express newspaper in late November.
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