Editing U Nu (section)

== Biography ==

U Nu (born Maung Nu) was born on 25 May 1907 in the Irrawaddy Delta town of Wakema, in British Burma, the son of a small trader, U San Htun, and his wife, Daw Saw Khin.<ref name="butwell">Butwell, Richard (1963). ''U Nu of Burma''. Stanford University Press, pp. 3–10.</ref> He was educated at a "national school" in Wakema, founded in the wake of the 1920–21 anticolonial boycott of government schools and housed in a Buddhist monastery, before proceeding to Rangoon, where he completed his B.A. at the University of Rangoon in 1929 and returned in the mid-1930s to read law.<ref name="butwell" /> As president of the Rangoon University Students' Union, Nu joined Aung San in leading the landmark 1936 student strike, sparked by their expulsion for refusing to name the author of an article critical of a university official; the strike, one of the first major confrontations between young Burmese nationalists and the colonial administration, brought both men to national prominence.<ref>Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', pp. 25–27.</ref>

Nu subsequently joined the ''Dobama Asiayone'' ("We Burmans Association"), adopting the nationalist honorific ''thakin'' ("master"), and in December 1937 helped found the Nagani ("Red Dragon") Book Club, which translated and distributed Marxist and other left-wing literature to a Burmese readership; Nu himself contributed translations and a tract on Marxism to the Club's output.<ref>Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', pp. 27–31, 50.</ref> Arrested by the British for sedition in 1940, he was released after the 1942 Japanese invasion and served in Dr. Ba Maw's Japanese-sponsored wartime administration, first as foreign minister and later as minister of information.<ref>Oxford Reference (n.d.), "U Nu"; Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', pp. 44–49.</ref>

After the war, Nu, who had briefly retired to Moulmeingyun to write and meditate, was drawn back into politics at the urging of both Aung San and the Communist leadership, and joined the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) as vice president.<ref>Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', pp. 49–53.</ref> Following the assassination of Aung San and most of his cabinet on 19 July 1947, Nu became AFPFL president and, upon independence on 4 January 1948, Burma's first prime minister.<ref>Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', pp. 55–58.</ref> He led the country through fourteen turbulent years marked by ethnic and communist insurgencies, economic reconstruction, and a foreign policy of nonalignment, while also sponsoring a major restoration of Buddhist institutions: he established a Buddha Sasana Council, hosted the Sixth Buddhist Council (''Chattha Sangayana'') at Rangoon in 1954–56 to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's ''parinibbana'', and patronized the mass lay ''vipassana'' meditation movement associated with the monk Mahasi Sayadaw.<ref>Su, Khine Thant (2022). "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity in Colonial and Postwar Burma: An Analysis of U Nu's Political Thought". In: Galway, Matthew, & Marc H. Opper (Eds), ''Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia'': 107–136. ANU Press, pp. 108–111.</ref>

Nu voluntarily relinquished the premiership to his deputy, [[U Ba Swe]], for nine months in 1956–57 in order to concentrate on party reorganization, then resumed office. Ideological and personal tensions with his Socialist Party colleagues Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein came to a head in mid-1958, when the ruling AFPFL split into Nu's "Clean AFPFL" and the rival "Stable AFPFL" led by Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein; unable to survive a subsequent no-confidence vote without the parliamentary support of the left-wing National United Front, Nu invited the army Chief of Staff, General Ne Win, to head a "caretaker government" later that year.<ref>Trager, Frank N. (1959). "Political Divorce in Burma". ''Foreign Affairs'' 37.2: 317–327, pp. 320–324.</ref> Returned to power after his Union Party's landslide victory in the February 1960 election, Nu pushed through a controversial 1961 constitutional amendment establishing Buddhism as Burma's state religion, over the objections of Christian, Muslim, and animist minorities concentrated in the country's ethnic states; the resulting instability was cited by General Ne Win in justifying the coup of 2 March 1962, which ended Nu's government and Burma's parliamentary era.<ref>Su (2022), "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity," pp. 131–134.</ref>

Ne Win imprisoned Nu until 1966. In 1969 Nu went into exile, first organizing an armed resistance movement, the Parliamentary Democracy Party, from bases along the Thai border, before relocating to India. He returned to Burma under a general amnesty in 1980 and, in a striking final turn, was ordained as a Buddhist monk that July, devoting himself for several years to editing and translating Pali canonical texts.<ref>"U Nu". ''Encyclopaedia Britannica'' (n.d.).</ref> During the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the elderly Nu briefly emerged from retirement to declare a symbolic interim government, for which the successor State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) placed him under house arrest from 1989 to 1992. He died in Rangoon on 14 February 1995.