I have great pleasure to welcome you all to the presentation ceremony of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding for the year 1993 to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.  As circumstances do not permit her to be present in person on this occasion she has chosen Daw Than E to receive the Award on her behalf.

Daw Than E is no stranger to India.  She has lived in this country for several years.  As a young and silver-tongued broadcastor she had contributed her bit over the All India Radio to the liberation of Burma during the Second World War.  Suu Kyi has described her as a much-loved family friend and as her "honorary aunt".  May I extend a hearty welcome to her as the representative of Aung San Suu Kyi and as a friend of India.  I also welcome to our midst Lady Patricia Gore-Booth, a close friend of Suu Kyi as well as of India who has travelled from the United Kingdom specially to attend this Award-giving ceremony.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the recipient of several prestigious international awards including the Nobel Peace Prize.  But I believe that the Jawaharlal Nehru Award has a special significance.  It is integrally associated with the ideals and methods of Gandhi and Nehru which she shares with fervour and practices without fear.  The Norwegian Nobel Committee, while conferring the Peace Prize on Suu Kyi, has pointedly referred to her "non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights" and to the fact that she had showed "an early interest in Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent protest".  Is it not appropriate that we in India recognized with our most prestigious award the profound spiritual relationship that exists between our country and this great "woman of destiny" from Asia?

Aung San Suu Kyi had spent some of her formative years as school-girl and college girl in Delhi when her gracious mother, Daw Khin Kyi, was the Ambassador of Burma to India.  She has, during that period, imbibed something our cultural and political traditions apart from making many close friends and admirers.  We were fortunate to have her again in India, this time as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, when she wrote a penetrating comparative study of "Intellectual Life in Burma and India under Colonialism".  Suu Kyi is thus an extra-ordinary person who had lived, studied, understood and loved India.  Thereafter she pursued a rewarding academic career abroad along with a stint as an international civil servant with the United Nations.  From this placid and promising career the hand of fate or rather destiny pushed her into the maelstrom of politics.  She responded to this challenge saying: "I have a responsibility to my country as my father's daughter".

Between Pandit Nehru and General Aung San there was much that is in common in spite of the wide difference in age.  Both were leaders of the anti-colonial revolution in Asia, and both believed passionately in freedom and democracy in Asia.  If Nehru laid the solid foundations of democracy in India, the young Aung San saw the vision of democracy for his country.  He said: "Democracy is the only ideal consistent with freedom.  It is also an ideology that strengthens and promotes peace.  It is therefore the only ideal we should aim for".  To-day the whole world is aiming for democracy, and moving towards it.  As her father's daughter Aung San Suu Kyi has emerged as the authentic heroine of freedom and democracy in her country.  She is pursuing this ideal through peaceful and non-violent means.  Her own life and conduct has become a living testimony to the abiding relevance of non-violence in the modern world.

With Gandhi, Nehru and her father she shares a common characteristic -- immense courage and freedom from fear.  Like them she considered fear as the greatest enemy of a nation or an individual.  "It is not power that corrupts but fear", she said once, "Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."   Jawaharlal Nehru declared very early in his political career:  "We cannot command success.  But success often comes to those who dare and act;  it seldom goes to the timid who are ever afraid of consequences.  We play for high stakes, and if we seek to achieve great things it can only be through great dangers;  whether we succeed soon or late, none but ourselves can stop us from high endeavour and from writing a noble page in our country's long and splendid history."  Aung San Suu Kyi has dared and acted, and written a new and noble page in the splendid history of her country.  But much is yet to be written.  We are happy that she is now free and is aiming at peace, reconciliation and unity in her country.  Indeed her example is a beacon light to all those working for freedom and for a better world.

Aung San Suu Kyi has emphasized the importance of human values in to-day's world obsessed with economic and materialistic values.  "The challenge we now face", she told the World Commission on Culture and Development which met in Manila recently, "is for different nations and peoples of the world to agree on a basic set of human values, which will serve as a unifying force in the development of a genuine global community.  True economic transformation can take place in the context of international peace and international political stability.  A rapid democratic transition and strengthening of institutions of civil society are the sine qua non for this development.  Only then will we be able to look for a future where human beings are valued for what they are rather than for what they produce."  Aung San Suu Kyi stands for this search for a basic set of human values for every country and for all peoples as unifying force in a global community.

India and Myanmar have been engaged in this search from the days of the Buddha.  Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Aung San have pursued this goal.  Aung San Suu Kyi to-day upholds the values which underpin the common future of mankind and she is recognized as a symbol of peace and friendship as well as a symbol of challenge to injustice the world over.  It is in recognition of these extra-ordinary virtues and strengths and her magnificent and fearless deeds as a leader that the Jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award has chosen to bestow this honour on Aung San Suu Kyi.

May I now call upon the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations to read the citation of the Award, and request Rashtrapatiji to confer the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Thank you.