Feels good to be in India: Suu Kyi

New Delhi, Nov 14 (IANS) It was good to be back in India, Myanmar’s iconic pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi said Wednesday.

“It feels very good to be in India, and I am glad that I can still recognise parts of Delhi,” Suu Kyi told TIMES NOW television channel ahead of meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The Nobel laureate, who spent her growing years in India, arrived here Tuesday on a six-day visit during which she is to meet India’s leaders as well as friends from her school and college days in Delhi.

This is Suu Kyi’s first visit to India in nearly 40 years, according to newsmagazine Irrawaddy.

Suu Kyi studied at the Convent of Jesus and Mary School and graduated in political science from Lady Shri Ram College, one of Delhi’s most reputed colleges for women, when her mother was Burma’s envoy to India.

She is expected to meet students and the faculty of LSR, as her college is known.

On the political level, she said she wanted closer relations between the people of the two countries because a gulf had emerged in recent years.

Also Wednesday, she will deliver the Nehru Memorial Lecture on the occasion of the birth anniversary of India’s first prime minister.

Suu Kyi and her mother — Suu Kyi’s father was a friend of Nehru — lived in the 1960s on 24 Akbar Road, now the headquarters of the Congress party.

Suu Kyi is also scheduled to meet Vice President Hamid Ansari, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid.

She will visit The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Gurgaon, before flying to Bangalore and Andhra Pradesh.

India awarded Suu Kyi the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1992 while she was under house arrest under the military government in Myanmar.

During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Myanmar in May, Suu Kyi had spoken of the need for greater exchanges between the people of the two countries.

IANS 2012-11-14 12:00:30