by A. J. PHILIP
year when my journalist son accompanied the then External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, to Myanmar, I made a request to him: Please bring a photograph of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the grave of Bahadurshah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, who was more a poet than a ruler. He was exiled to Burma by the British following the suppression of the 1857 uprising, called the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ by the British and the ‘First War of Independence’ by ‘Veer’ Savarkar.
Today many people may not even know about Bahadurshah Zafar except as the name of a road, the equivalent of the Fleet Street in London where most newspapers were once located. The ruler, who composed Urdu poems, the standard of which was no less than that of the Hindi poems Atal Bihari Vajpayee used to pen, was spending the evening of his life in obscurity at the Red Fort in Delhi when the “mutineers”, who reached Delhi from Meerut, could not think of anything better than to entrust him with the leadership of the country.
He proved unequal to the task when the British, who were taken aback by the “mutiny”, rallied their forces and mounted a successful campaign to recapture Delhi and send the “mutineers” to the gallows. The ruler was caught and “exiled” to Burma, rather than killed and buried in the Pacific Ocean a la Osama bin Laden. There he died of old age. His grave witnesses some activity whenever an Indian leader visits Rangoon and pays him homage.
My son dutifully brought a lot of pictures from that trip. I came to know for the first time about the grandeur of Naypyidaw, the capital city the military junta had built for itself. The buildings were stunningly beautiful and the streets and pavements were well maintained. However, one thing was missing in the pictures — the people. Naypyidaw is, like Islamabad, meant only for the rulers. Yet, the few people there voted massively for Aung San Suu Kyi’s party when a by-election was held in the city last year.
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