


Suu Kyi, aged 75, herself perhaps might have got impatient too early under international pressure to improve her fallen image and go down in the history as someone who not only fought against military oppression and suffered incarceration but also completed the process of transformation from military authoritarianism to full-fledged democracy, might have giving the impression she was in a hurry to push the army back to the barracks.

This very success of Suu Kyi and her party alarmed the military and contributed to her undoing. Even if they were held, the NLD would have still won, as the performances of ethnic parties with all their mergers and of the main opposition party, Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), controlled by retired Generals, were quite poor. To be sure, elections were not held for 22 seats in the Rakhine, Shan and a few other states ostensibly for ethnic unrest and, of course, 166 seats are reserved for the military. The results also show that, notwithstanding some major shortcomings of her last administration, people, not just the Bamar majority but also some from the ethnic minorities also believe that if at all anyone could bring some semblance of democracy in the current circumstances, it is Mother Suu. Despite serious misgivings in the international press that demoted, Suu Kyi from an icon of democracy to a perpetrator of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, she and her NLD have proved that Myanmar people still repose their faith in her leadership preferring continuity and stability to uncertainty in the country. The fact that coup d'état occurred the day before the Parliament of Myanmar was due to swear in the members elected at the 2020 election, and the prevention of this from occurring is very significant, indicating a sense of insecurity on the part of the Tatmadaw and a lingering fear that, notwithstanding the privileges it secured under the 2008 Constitution of 25 percent reserved seats and control over internal security, defence and border affairs, Suu Kyi with her landslide victory securing 396 of the 476 seats in the combined houses of the national parliament (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw) and her reaching out to ethnic parties to join it to form a unity government and build a democratic federal union, might achieve the miracle to change the constitutional provisions.

In the new dispensation, he remains the most powerful man for an indefinite period Min Hlaing was to retire in a couple of months with the prospect of going into oblivion as a general without the command of the army is a non-entity. Even while protests, demonstrations and open defiance of the military take-over are taking place in major cities of Myanmar together with strongest international condemnation and the threat of sanctions hanging like Damocles sword, knowing the pathology of Myanmar military, its past records, socio-political orientation, particularly its word view as the guardian of the state, it will not cut much ice with MinHlaing, who, along with the corporate interests of the military, has his own motivation to stay in power. The worst fears of an army take-over, open talk of which were going aroundfor some time after the elections in November, has come true, spelling doom to the prospect of democracy for the time being and throwing the country into long spell of instability and uncertainty. Hours after the detention of Suu Kyi, Myanmar's army declared a yearlong state of emergency and said power had been handed to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Min Aung Hlaing. On the morning of February 1, Myanmar’s all-powerful Tatmadaw detained the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and other senior figures from the governing party, National League for Democracy (NLD) seizing power in a coup less than 10 years after it handed over power to a civilian government.
