New Delhi, Jul 23 (IANS): The government has invited Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to visit India.

The invitation was extended to Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, when Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao met her at her villa in Yangon last month. The meeting lasted for an hour.

"I hope she comes to India. She spoke warmly of India," said a government source familiar with the discussions between Rao and Suu Kyi, who was recently freed from several years of house arrest.

This was the first high-level Indian contact with Myanmar's pro-democracy icon and Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, who studied in the Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi.

At the end of the meeting, both expressed a desire for the bilateral relationship to blossom and grow, sources said.

Rao had accompanied External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna on a three-day visit to Myanmar in June.

Amid criticism by some western countries that India was not doing enough to push the cause of democracy in Myanmar, the sources defended India's pursuit of its economic and strategic interests in that neighbouring country.