By the end of WWII  the troops of the British Empire reconstituted the great crescent of land that Britain had occupied before 1941, and then fanned out beyond it. In 1945 South East Asia Command was apparently determined to deploy Indian troops not only in Burma, Malaya and Singapore , but also in Thailand and what had been French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia. By 1946 however as we have seen, Colonial Asia became a connected arc of protest. Everywhere local nationalists borrowed the words and emulated the deeds of neighbors, and the language of the Atlantic Charter and the San Francisco Declaration became a common tongue for all.

In early 1946 Indonesia 's struggle was first raised in the United Nations, and this made it a test case for the rights of fledgling nations everywhere. In British Asia, nationalists followed events in Indo-China and Indonesia as if their own future were being decided, which it effectively was. In Malaya the cause of the Indonesian republic captivated not only the Malays, who felt tied to it by kinship and language, but the whole of Malayan society, whose trade unions, youth and women's movements all took up its slogans. The Chinese population caught up in the fighting in Semarang and Surabaya appealed directly to the community in Malaya , and many fled there as refugees. Once more events in India changed the situation in Burma and sent shock waves speeding towards Malaya . Following Gandhi and the Indian Congress's great victories in the March 1946 elections, it had become obvious that the Indian Army could not be used to put down a revolt in Burma.

Now, as the impasse in Indian politics deepened, it also became clear that the British withdrawal from the country would be faster than anyone could possibly have predicted. The political outcome of the elections in the Punjab in the spring had left the Muslim League deeply embittered, although it had done rather well in several other provinces, notably through its proxies in Bengal. Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Pethick-Lawrence on their Cabinet Mission failed to find any common ground between warring politicians in Simla or Delhi. Congress refused to allow the Muslim League 'parity' of power in a future independent central government. The only alternative for Jinnah and the Muslim League was a weak centre in Delhi , with powerful provinces, so ensuring that Muslims would be in a strong position in Bengal and the Punjab. But this raised fears in the Congress of the 'Balkanization' of the country and even of its total disintegration. No deal was possible. Cripps found himself baffled and disillusioned yet again, not only by what he took to be Jinnah's perennial intransigence, but also by Gandhi's unhelpful stance now that the transfer of power was clearly in sight. Among ordinary people hope and fear alternated day by day. The word ' Pakistan ' was used as both threat and incentive. It had been in the air since 1940 when the Muslim League had officially endorsed.

The Cold War brought new violence to the end of empire; as the local struggles in Southeast Asia were now seen as a part of a global chain of conflicts between the two power blocs. Reduced in political might and fearing the spread of communism, the waning colonial powers - Britain, France and the Netherlands - redeployed the weapons of the Second World War in the guise of counter-insurgency campaigns in those Asian territories, where they retained a fragile hold. As a result the hopes for liberal democracy that had sustained for decades colonial nationalists and European liberals alike were largely dashed. The advocates of social revolution were now fighting for their lives.

 
If the bifocal Pakistan that had emerged a few months earlier was a geographer's nightmare, the idea of Karenistan was a mapmaker's hell. Only in the forested Salween tract of the south were the Karens a majority of the population. This rather backward area could hardly form the basis of a separate unit within Burma , let alone a proud new member of the Commonwealth and the United Nations, as some dreamers hoped. Elsewhere in the delta the Karens were simply too scattered to constitute a political unit, even if overall they comprised 20 per cent of the local population. The decisive point was that, unlike Karachi and Dacca in the two wings of Pakistan , Karenistan would have had no big town to act as a gateway to the world. Sleepy Moulmein was the nearest the Karens got to a capital and here they were nowhere near a majority of the population.

Political dreamers, however, are not overmuch influenced by the study of geography. Besides, there were good reasons, both long and short term, that the Karen issue should come to the boil again in the early summer of 1948. In the first place, the Karens were now acutely aware of how dependent the Burmese government was on the Karen element of the old colonial Burma Army, and in particular on Smith Dun. They saw with mounting alarm the drift of all the other elements in the army either to the communists or to mutiny. But while the government was actually militarily dependent on the Karens and other minorities, the direction of its policy belied this basic fact. Karen leaders were suspicious of Nu's oft-stated desire to compromise with the communists. They scanned the government's economic programme with dismay. It was following a slow, centralizing drift that they believed would eventually render the Panglong agreement irrelevant. Christian Karens, in particular, were opposed on principle to 'godless communism' and believed that once Nu felt free to escape to a monastery, whatever government came to rule Burma would be hostile to them.

It was Burmese thugs, not the Japanese, who had massacred the Karens when the BIA ripped into the delta in 1942 and the raw memory of the hundreds of men, women and children slaughtered fed a much older sense of difference and alienation. Karen fears became sharper in September and October, when leftist army officers decided to raise yet another irregular force, the Sitwundan. A politically moderate Burmese officer, on the point of resignation, identified the leaders of this organization as 'dacoits or ex-dacoits or people familiar in police records. Some of them are either known criminals or political chameleons.'

By 1 September Karen paramilitary forces were in charge of the port of Moulmein, a powerful statement of their aim of political separatism. They were joined in this insurrection by another delta people, the Mons . The Mon population was abut 300,000. They were the remaining descendants of the once dominant people of southern Burma who had been defeated, or assimilated, by the Burmese after 1760. This uprising, however, was unlike either the communist insurgency or the military mutinies. At first there was little actual fighting between the Burmese forces and the Karens and Mons .

Rather than redeploying its scarce troops, let alone putting at issue the loyalty of the Karen battalion, the government had to bargain for time politically. It reopened talks on the question of Karen and pacified the Karens by persuading them that their home villages were not likely to come under immediate assault.  In fact, most of the Burmese were inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt and were much more hostile to the communists than to the socialist government. As the year drew to its end the situation in Burma still seemed so grave that the Americans, acutely alert to the threat of communism, were now seriously worried. Later in the year the government attempted to disband the remaining 'loyal' Karen battalions of the army, fearing they too would mutiny. On Christmas Eve 1948, Burmese irregulars threw hand grenades into a Karen church where people were celebrating the festival. The fleeing congregation was shot down or bayoneted. The insurgent Karen forces now went on the offensive, digging in at Insein, close to the capital, even after they failed to take Rangoon itself. Rangoon civilians took day trips out to the front where the army allowed them to take pot shots at the Karen fighters for one rupee a bullet. (Jonathan Falla, True Love and Bartholomew: rebels on the Burmese border Cambridge, 1991, p. 26). The only hope, as Furnivall put it, was that 'it is Ilot that the rebels are strong, but the Government is weak'. (Furnivall to Dunn, 24 December 1948, Furnivall Papers, PPIMS 23, vol. I, SOAS).

The year 1948 also saw Indian power recede from Burma for the first time in 130 years. One of the most venerated public places in Mandalay , particularly in the year of independence when enemies were pressing in on all sides, was the pagoda that held the great image of Buddha Mahamuni. This had,been taken from the kingdom of Manipur on the Burma-India border in the late eighteenth century when the Burmese king Bodhayappa had been trying to create a Buddhist empire in Southeast Asia. The raid into the northeast of the Indian subcontinent had attracted the attention of a much bigger and well-armed commercial empire, that of the East India Company. From the 1820S onward, Burma had been subject to successive waves of invasion by British troops, colonial logging companies, ruby and oil interests and, finally, Indian merchants and labourers. In 1944 and 1945 the British Indian Army had invaded the country and as late as October 1947 there had still been thousands of Indian soldiers there. That influence had now been withdrawn. Indian troops had left Burma along with the last British officers and civil servants. Up to 800,000 Indian civilians remained in the country, some like Balwant Singh in positions of authority. But India 's proxy empire in Burma disappeared with the end of British rule in the subcontinent'. Nehru and his foreign-affairs expert Krishna Menon had no desire for a greater Indian empire. They discouraged both the Indian businessmen and labour unions which wanted to keep a hold on their smaller eastern neighbour. Pakistan retained an interest in the Muslim population of Arakan, but was keen to avoid any further ethnic and religious conflicts that might compromise its bizarre set of borders. The huge land mass of the Indian subcontinent continued to exert its gravitational pull on Burma, like a monster planet influencing a satellite moon, but empire had given way to moral and economic suasion.

In part, this was because the great subcontinent was absorbed in its own problems and because residual British influence was deployed to keep the new dominions from each other's throats. Mountbatten, the last British leader to span both India and Burma , was preoccupied with the problems that arose from partition. Some of the British who 'stayed on' accused him of 'too much pomp, overacting and creating a " Hollywood atmosphere". (Military adviser to UK High Commission in India to London, 30 March 1948, L/WS/r/rr87, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library).

But Indians enjoyed seeing newsreels where he and his wife Edwina were shown deep in discussion with Gandhi or at the recently assassinated leader's funeral. Later in the year an unofficial war broke out between India and Pakistan over Nehru's beloved state of Kashmir. The Indian Army was deployed in the mountainous country along long lines of communication to combat invasion by Muslim irregulars, who were determined to bring the Muslim-majority state into Pakistan.That autumn the Indian Army was also used to occupy and absorb into India the recalcitrant princely state of Hyderabad , whose royal line was Muslim. The ostenssible enemy were bands of Muslim irregulars called Razakars, who opposed union with India . But a wider shadow was now falling across the whole of South and Southeast Asia .

Vallabhbhai Patel, viewed with alarm the beginning of communist 'base areas' in the Andhra areas of Madras and nearby southeast Hyderabad . And his British assistant Roy Bucher wrote that the 'greater fragmentation of India which would have occurred had Hyderabad become independent, must have resulted in Communism making more headway in this continent'. (Bucher to Miss Elizabeth Bucher, 24 September 1948, Bucher Papers, 79°1/87-5, National Archive, Kew, London).

Here Bucher was anticipating a theme which President Eisenhower would coin into that masterful, if erroneous, concept of the 'domino theory' in which communist insurgency would topple one postcolonial country after another in South and Southeast Asia. By 1948 China, Vietnam and Burma seemed seriously threatened by the new political contagion. Even in India , observers espoused a kind of 'mini-domino theory'. Hyderabad might link up with Andhra and even with Kerala in the southwest, where communist parties were making electoral headway. In turn, south Indian communism might be linked through Bengal with Arakanese and Burmese communism and on into Southeast Asia. Actually, for most of Bengal 's population in 1948, the most pressing issue remained the fate of the refugees. People continued to flood across the new border in both directions, fleeing murder and arson during the great Hindu and Muslim festivals, but now scarified by local militias trying to firm up the lines of Radcliffe's national border. Communal warfare remained endemic, yet in both north and south Bengal poor peasants were still agitating for better economic conditions, urged on by communists who claimed that Hindu-Muslim conflict was really a smoke screen behind which capitalists, imperialists and 'feudal elements' pursued their wicked ways. In the northeast of India, the leadership of a section of the Naga people, which had declared independence the previous August, remained intransigent, waiting to see how Indian administration would turn out in practice.

Against this background the city of Calcutta hosted a series of massive communist meetings. The aim was to show solidarity with the Soviet Communist Party, whose secretary Andrei Zhdanov had recently declared an international struggle against 'American neo-colonialism'. It was also designed to warn off India's tough, right-wing home minister, Sardar Patel, who was now locking up communist agitators with as much despatch as the British had once done. (People's Age, I February 1948). From 19 to 26 February a South East Asia Youth Conference met in the city. Thirty thousand people marched through Calcutta alongside representatives from Malaya , Vietnam , Burma and China . A Chinese youth carried aloft the bloodstained shirt of a comrade who had died on the battlefield, in protest against 'reaction'. (People's Age, 29 February 1948). Old conflicts between Bose supporters and hardline communists re-emerged. But the popular mood was heady. It received further fuel when the second congress of the Communist Party of India convened in Calcutta a little later. Than Tun arrived proclaiming the need for Indian and Burmese communists to link and overthrow the 'sham independence' with which the imperialists had saddled Burma and, by implication, India. (People's Age, 14 March 1948).

Malayan communists rapidly moving towards open insurrection followed the proceedings with rapt attention. It was not surprising that British and American observers looked at these events, put them together with the attempt of the USSR to starve out the city of Berlin, and decided that a worldwide communist conspiracy was afoot. For most people in India, however, independence was far from a sham. Despite the troubles, there was widespread rejoicing and nowhere more so than in the army. Despite the bloody dawn of independence observers spoke of a 'spirit of joyous freedom'. The Indian Army in Kashmir, said the Indian attache to the British high commissioner in Delhi, 'was as joyous and happy as a daughter-in-law who had managed to shake off her troublesome and nagging mother-in-law and set up her own house'. (Military adviser to UK High Commission in India to London, 6 May 1948, L/WS/r/rr87, OIOC).

Britain's old colonial Indian Army, which had once ranged across the whole of the crescent from Bengal and Assam to Singapore, victorious in North Africa and Italy , was broken up. In November 1947, the last of the Indian legions had departed from the subcontinent. Among the last to leave were the 2 Royal Lancers - the 'Bengal Lancers' of legend - to be divided between India and Pakistan. (Ashton Wade, A life on the line, Tunbridge Wells, 1988, pp. 147-9).

But many of the military stores went to Malaya to build up the fortress there; one third of the small island of Singapore was now given over to the military. Each service demanded two square miles of valuable land to house their radio transmitting and receiving stations. Among the baggage train were large stocks of whisky. It was shipped back to the United Kingdom : a telling augury of the end of empire. (Andrew Gilmour, My role in the rehabilitation of Singapore, 1946-53, (Singapore , 1973, p. 16).

Increasingly also, the United States was taking over key strategic responsibilities in parts of Asia; for example, American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States ' commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. A major review of Britain's long-term policy in Southeast Asia for the cabinet in October 1949 continued to see a British role there as indispensable to world peace, but it also acknowledged that 'no plans will, however, be really successful without American participation'. (Gent to Creech Jones, 30 December 1947, 4 January 1948, CO 537/3 667,TNA).

By 1949 British Asia the great crescent of land that four years earlier had linked Suez to Sydney in one overarching, cosmopolitan swathe collapsed. Its last  proconsul, Louis Mountabatten, had finally left the region. The old Indian Army was dismantled. The new sovereign nations of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (though not Burma ) remained in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But this was a fragile, and divided entity, and many more concrete linkages in the region where severed. The route from India to China , via the Burma Road , even today (February 2007) is closed.

When in 1950 Nehru visited Singapore (with him his daughter Indira), his speeches signaled the change: 'Indians in Malaya', he announced, 'should not look to India for any help; neither is India in a position to render any because she has her own problems to solve and her own population to look after. 'In the present day', he explained, 'governments have to deal with all kinds of violence and force and inevitably they have to deal with that with force.' (Simon C. Smith, British relations with the Malay rulers from decentralization to independence, 1930-1957, Kuala Lumpur , 1995, pp. 97-9).

In fact the war in Malaya would drag on until 1960 and eventually claim the lives of 6,697 CTs 'communist terrorists' (not all of whom were combatants), 1,865 members of the security forces, most of them Malay policeman, and 2,473 civilians, most of them Chinese. (Editorial, Malaya Tribune, 15 December 1947).

Enter; General Sir Gerald Templer, a former director of military intelligence with in crisis-ridden post-war Germany, during which he had sacked Konrad Adenauer (later to become Cancellor of Germany) as mayor of Cologne. (See John Cloake, Templer: tiger of Malaya London , 1985).

One of his first actions following his arrival in S. Malaysia, March 1952; was to direct personally a draconian collective punishment operation against the town of Tanjong Malim, the scene of heavy guerrilla activity where recent government casualties had included a hero of 'the wooden horse' POW escapade, Lieutenant R. M. C. Codner. Templer would descend on truculent resettlement areas to parade and berate their inhabitants. In one famous incident he began, 'You are all bastards.' A Chinese interpreted: 'His Excellency says that none of your parents were married.' 'Well', continued Templer, 'I can be a bastard too.' 'His Excellency says his parents were also unmarried.' (Robert Heussler, British rule in Malaya, 1942-57, Singapore, 1985, p. 186).

In fact Temple , was known to be ‘constantly in the field’, where his presence was likened to the charismatic dynamism of ‘Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny’ in Indo-China, and he took strong stands against diehard employers and colonial prejudice. For ongoing controversy, see Karl Hack, '''Iron claws on Malaya": the historiography of the Malayan Emergency', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 30, I (1999), pp. 99-125, who also argues for an early change of direction, and Kumar Ramakrishna, who restates the pivotal importance of Templer in ''Transmogrifying Malaya": the impact of Sir Gerald Templer (1952-54)', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 32, I (2001), pp. 79-92.

The key component of the campaign - resettlement on a mass scale - had been begun in earnest in Gurney's time by Sir Harold Briggs, who was pulled out of retirement after his campaigns in Burma to become the first director of operations. He developed a plan to 'roll up' Malaya from the south. (Hack, ''Iron claws on Malaya ", pp. 115-23).

This began in, as those responsible admitted, an experimental and 'rough and ready' fashion in June 1950 in Johore. As one European resident put it: 'This fair land is now, it would appear, in danger of becoming infested with a series of untidy, shabby shanty towns: a succession of inferior Butlin's camps but lacking the amenities.' (Johore Council of State, 4 October 1950, Sel.Sec/I51/r49, Arkib Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur).

The programme was largely completed by the end of 1952. What Templer achieved was co-ordination of Emergency work with the everyday business of government. He also possessed a stronger mandate from Whitehall , and a clearer appreciation of the impending advance of self-government. This added a new dynamism to local politics that had been paralyzed by the Emergency. Again, there was little new in the letter of Templer's statements on the transfer of power delivered on his installation in Kuala Lumpur ; the commitment was already there. But Templer set about executing it with the briskness of a country solicitor winding up a heavily entailed estate. And in the words of one official, the people were to be 'suitably instructed towards their own emancipation' (D. W. Le Mare, 'Community development', INF/I8677/533, ANM).

All this entailed a massive expansion of government outside the counter-insurgency campaign; from local government and town-and-country planning to the electricity grid and the road network. This resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match. It also created a strong - and potentially over-bearing - state: the number of its employees grew from 48,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1959. Equally, the ravages of war and occupation were repaired to a degree that Burma never experienced. But the idea that 'winning hearts and minds' was a carefully prepared strategy is a myth. The classic manual was written - by Robert Thompson, an ex-Chindit, Chinese affairs officer and later secretary for defence in Malaya - only after the Emergency had ended. (See, Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency: experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, London, 1966).

“For miles .. , was the ' New Village ', spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, huddled there, foot deep in brackish mud. There were some atap huts with zinc roofs, obviously brought from elsewhere. I shall never forgot the pale and puffy faces: beri-beri, or the ulcers on their legs. Their skin had the hue of the swamp. (Han Suyin, My house has two doors, London, 1980, p. 79).

The routine harassment of women and men by strip-searching during the daily food searches as people left the village of Semenyih became a public scandal; the official report painted a picture of proud and individualistic cultivators, goaded by the daily indignity almost beyond endurance. (Federation of Malaya, Report on the conduct of food searches at Semenyih in the Kajang District of the State of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, 1956). The military still dealt in crude racial stereotypes, and Templer's personal endorsement of a thinly disguised soldier's fiction, Jungle Green, with its racist language, caused a storm among the Chinese community. The charge that the British were, at bottom, 'playing the race card' was never dispelled. (Frank Furedi, 'Britain's colonial wars: playing the ethnic card', Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 28, I, 1990,pp70-89).

The cost of maintaining and operating forces furthermore was a crippling burden, it also was entirely fortuitous that the British were able to meet it through the windfall of the Korean War boom in Malaya 's raw materials. This was first brought to light by Richard Stubbs, Counter-insurgency and the economic factor: the impact of the Korean War prices boom on the Malayan Emergency (ISEAS Occasional paper no. 19, Singapore, 1974).

But above all, Asian business revived. The profits of Chinese towkays were increasingly reinvested in Malaya , in rubber estates and in shares in locally registered companies. The leading Chinese bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, was on a par with the European concerns and held two-thirds of the total deposits of Chinese banks in Malaya . Tan Cheng Lock was a director both of OCBC and of the colonial concern Sime Derby. (Nicholas J. White, Business, government and the end of empire: Malaya, 1945-1957,Kuala Lumpur, 1996, pp. 51-3).

This was important because much of the burden of counter-insurgency - for relief and after-care - fell on Malayans, and the decisive shifts in the conflict came within Malayan society itself. This was chiefly the process whereby the Chinese consolidated their stake in the country and the Chinese leadership, now gathered together in the Malayan Chinese Association, consolidated its grip on the community. In this the British, of course, played a role; in encouraging Chinese enlistment in the police, in the vital struggle to give land title to resettled farmers. But often the British were bystanders. For an extended discussion of the 'domestication' of the Malayan Chinese, see T. N. Harper, The end of empire and the making of Malaya (Cambridge, 1999), chs. 5 and 6.

The Emergency was also fought by Malay officials as they sought to recover their authority in troubled Malay kampongs. But Malay wrath at the administrative attention showed on the erstwhile supporters of the communists was only partially assuaged by the expansion of rural health services and development funds. Malay policemen continued to bear the brunt of the casualties and they particularly resented another key aspect of the strategy: the rewards - sometimes thousands of dollars - paid to surrendered guerrillas who turned coat and informed on their comrades. 'Why should they risk their necks to help the [surrendered communists] get rewards greater than anything they were ever likely to come by?’ (Roy Follows, Jungle-beat: fighting terrorists in Malaya, 1952-61, London, 2000, p. 97).

 

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