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.
In early June 1950,
prime minister of Burma, U Nu, began a course of meditation, and retreated into
meditation centre and vowed not to emerge until he
had attained a certain stage in vipassana meditation.’Until
then', he told his ministers, 'do not send for me even if the whole country is
enveloped in flames. If there are flames, you must put them out yourself’. When
told of his practice Nu's closest foreign friend, Jawaharlal Nehru remarked:
'That seems to me as good a way of governing Burma as any.’
One of the main
components of the state of the consciousness which Nu believed that he had
attained that summer was 'freedom from fear'. But as the Korean War entered a
critical phase and the threat of global nuclear conflict grew ever closer, this
was no easy goal. By the middle of the year, Allied forces in Korea seemed on
the verge of conquering the whole peninsula and a major war with China and the
Soviet Union loomed. In Britain Attlee broadcast to the nation of further
preparations for war in Korea and also against Russia, 'if another world war is
to follow’. In Delhi, Nehru, urged the US to draw back, arguing that war solved
nothing. In his alarm, he seemed to be conjuring up again the non-violent
maxims of the late Mahatma Gandhi. Attacked by the Americans for appeasement of
totalitarianism, Nehru was equally suspect in China and Russia for his
suppression of Indian communists.
The period 1950 to
1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma. The government's authority began to
reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive
Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an
arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of
the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to
compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949,
the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their
policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more 'Maoist' in
their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They
were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak,
and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over
Rangoon, the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so
because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had
reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed
into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held
sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the
government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to
them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon's fold.
Under the surface of
the government's resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting
irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around
the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had
appropriated more and more of the country's diminished wealth. It benefited
from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed
camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or even India greedily
surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice.
The first coup
against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned
to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup
occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to
hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that
a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself
increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its
Southeast Asian neighbors, suffering international sanctions and continuing
local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming
China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.
In 1951 the wartime
administrator of Singapore, Mamoru Shinozaki, returned to the island, or at
least to its harbor, where, unable to land, he received guests on board a
freighter. Later Shinozaki was to lead the way in confronting the past with a
memoir, published in English in Singapore, of his wartime experiences: Syonan: My Story. It acknowledged the atrocities of the sook
ching massacres, but also highlighted his role and
his contribution to the welfare of Singapore 's people. These returns generated
considerable anger in the Chinese press. But, with the encouragement of key
figures such as Malcolm MacDonald, they persisted. In April 1952 the first
senior Japanese to visit MacDonald arrived at Bukit Serene with a letter from
the Japanese prime minister. The visitor was nervous. The cook at Bukit Serene
wept - his parents and sister had been murdered by the Japanese in China - but,
it was observed, he did his duty. By 1954 the flagship Japanese departmental
store, Echigoya, where a pre-war generation of Asian
clerks had bought their cheap office ducks and toys for their children,
reopened, as did the Singapore Japanese Association, which had been such a
prominent feature of the island's social scene before the war. The old Japanese
expatriate community began to return as 'advisers', often exploiting their
wartime connections. Some still saw Malaya as their home, and a sense of
rootedness began to return with the refoundation of the Japanese School.
Several Allied
soldiers, recounted how they had to dig deep into their reserves of Christian
faith to find forgiveness for the brutality of their Japanese captors. But as
early as ten years after the war, soldiers on both sides were beginning
tentative meetings for the purposes of reconciliation and creating a true
record of the terrible events they had witnessed. For their part, the Japanese
were also haunted by what they had seen in Southeast Asia. The author of the
Harp of Burma, a bestselling novel in post-war Japan, was a former soldier who
drew on his wartime experiences to tell of a disillusioned man whose battered
faith in the search for enlightenment is reinvigorated by the earnest folk
Buddhism of Burma. His hero becomes a wanderer, a kind of forest monk, typical
of the region, moving from village to village playing his Burmese harp and
telling fables.
Other vivid fictional
recreations of the Second World War sparked controversy. In 1954 the first
English translation appeared of Pierre Boulle's novel Le Pont de la Riviere
Kwai". The French author, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese,
depicted a group of British POWs being forced to build a bridge on the Burma-Siam
railway. The fictional senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, after a
protracted and painful battle with his Japanese jailer about officers' honor
and dignity, becomes obsessed with the creation and perfection of the bridge,
at the same time as British special forces are doing all they can to destroy
it. At first sight it seemed an odd thing for a Frenchman to write a novel
about the hidebound British military mentality, although his story undoubtedly
served as a good illustration of the futility of war. But Boulle had worked on
rubber plantations in Malaya before and after the war and had had ample
opportunity to observe the waning British Empire at close hand. In 1957, just
after Britain and France 's occupation of the Suez Canal, the controversy about
the book was revived, with an American movie starring Gregory Peck…
By 1955, the tenth
anniversary of the formal end of the Second World War, the mood was changing.
This was a year when the rhetoric of the Bandung Conference - of development,
non-alignment and peace - concealed both the onrush of aggressive nationalism
and the slow expansion of the crescent's new capitalism. Yet it was also the
year of memory, when people began to take stock of events in that terrible year
a decade before: the year of the atom bomb, the fierce campaign of the 14th
Army, the death of Subhas Chandra Bose and Aung San's revolt against the
Japanese. A whole series of commemorative ceremonies were held. In Rangoon and
Mandalay, people celebrated Independence Day, Aung San's birthday and Union Day
with particular fervor that year. Ominously, people noted that the highlight of
that year's Independence Day festivities was the 'participation of a larger
number of armed forces personnel in the march past before the President of the
Union '. As yet 'Army Day', the celebration of that momentous event in April
1945 when Aung San had led his Burma Defense Army into the jungle to fight the
Japanese, had not assumed the significance in the calendar of Independence Day.
As the Burmese army became increasingly autonomous and powerful, the meaning of
this festival became a source of debate and controversy. Ceremonies to mark the
tenth anniversary of the end of the war were more muted in India. But Subhas
Chandra Bose's birthday saw celebrations across the subcontinent, particularly
in Calcutta. The veterans of the Indian National Army, still uncertain of their
status in independent India, drilled and marched with particular pride. The
simplest ceremony of all was held on 6 August 1955 at 8 a.m. in the city of
Hiroshima. At the exact moment the bomb had fallen ten years before, the mayor
of the city, himself a survivor, released 500 doves into the air and
inaugurated a peace centre.
A huge numbers of
Thai, Burmese, Malayan and Burmese civilians however remained without named
graves. Their bodies had simply been thrown into huge lime pits.
Many people's
memories were very personal, almost picaresque. When he was in northern Burma
the writer Norman Lewis met a cheerful Burmese former soldier who had served in
the forces fighting alongside the Japanese. He took Lewis to a tree where, he
said, Chinese soldiers had tried to hang him as a traitor following his
capture. Laughing heartily he explained how the Chinese were too 'weak from
semi-sickness and starvation' to hoist him off the ground. His proposed
execution, according to Lewis, degenerated into 'a lurid Disney-like farce'
with the Chinese attempting to pinion him while hoisting him into the air.
Eventually he escaped, but the memory was not so easily defeated. It is
unlikely that Lewis was the only person he look back to his hanging tree to
marvel at the wound on the branch where the rope had rubbed it raw.Thus also, ten years on from the end of the war the
Governor General of Australia however observed, an authoritarian power once
again overshadowed Asia. He was referring, of course, to China.
If in 1955 people's
memories of the Second World War were still raw, with much suppressed or
forgotten, the present was in some ways a disappointment of those dreams of
independence which had entranced them a decade before. As India struggled with
the problems of statehood, Nehru was personally in a more optimistic mood in
1955· It was only with the resurgence of severe economic difficulties in the
late 1950’s and the conflict with China in his last years that his outlook
darkened. But in objective terms the problems that faced independent India
remained vast. If famine did not reappear as frequently as it had under the
Raj, the country's food problems seemed no nearer solution.
And many millions
continued to live in the direst poverty while the first Hush of wealth from the
new industrialization faded. Perhaps, indeed, Nehru's very adherence to a
Soviet model of gargantuan 'socialist industry' had worsened the poverty of the
countryside. The Punjab 's Sikhs and people in the south who did not speak
Hindi, the new national language, vociferously demanded special status within
the constitution. Refugees from East and West Pakistan had not been fully
absorbed into India 's massive, ramshackle cities. On the frontiers,
particularly in the northeast, militant groups such as the Nagas, who had been
armed and radicalized by the war, continued to fight the central government in
Delhi. India 's 'most dangerous decades' were looming.
The Bengali-speaking
politicians of East Pakistan chafed under what they saw as the semi-colonial
domination of their leaders in the western capital of Islamabad. Refugees
continued to surge across the borders in both directions, Hindus to the west,
Muslims to the east, creating new pools of privation in the poverty-stricken
countryside and declining cities. Even on Pakistan's and India's most easterly
frontier with Burma, conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim,
separatists and centralizers continued to kill hundreds and terrorize remote
villages.
Many of the acute
problems that faced the new nations could be traced directly to the nature of
British rule and the corroding, radicalizing effect of the Second World War.
They represented the other face of freedom from the beaming crowds and proud
processions on independence days. They were also testament to the continuing
role of the great Western powers in Asia and the coming of age of the new
leviathans, the USSR and China, which were determined to play their own Great
Game for South and Southeast Asia. As Nehru leaned towards the USSR, shunned by
the anti-communist USA, so the Soviet leadership flattered his wishes and the
Soviet security services began to infiltrate the country. Communist China, for
its part, fresh from its great success in bolstering Ho Chih
Minh in Vietnam, began to play politics in Burma, Pakistan, and Indonesia,
though it was impotent to affect the course of the war to the south in Malaya.
The Cold War gave new life to old fantasies of imperial dominance.
The tenth anniversary
of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that
era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged when they had still
been under the yoke of Japanese occupation and colonial rule. For one thing,
full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the
bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region.
At DienBien Phu, in April
1954, the French suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Viet Minh forces
supplied with artillery and modern weapons by the Chinese and Russians. The
Western fight against communist advance seemed to be deeply compromised, at
least on this front. An American officer, Colonel Edward Lansdale, landed on 1
June 1954 in Saigon, which was on the point of becoming the capital of a
vivisected South Vietnam under the peace accords signed between the French and
the Viet Minh in Geneva. Lansdale drew heavily on the British experience of
counter-insurgency in Malaya while he was working in the Philippines and
Vietnam.
After Adlai
Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed,
vice-president Richard Nixon flew to Malaya where Templer impressed the need to
wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress
hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British
imperial cause. But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had
flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk
rebels were settled, gathering information for their own 'New Villages' on the
peninsula. Lansdale's journey to Saigon signalled the
beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam. The looming conflict
was also marked in fiction by Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American,
published in 1955.A New York Times reporter just happened to be on the spot at
the vital moment. Photographs of people maimed in the attack were speedily
published under a headline blaming Ho Chi Minh for the violence.
By 1955 Lansdale was
certainly working hard to put in place a third force to take over from the
French as a bulwark against the communists. In that year he helped organize a
coup which placed the city of Saigon in the hands of the future dictator of
South Vietnam, Ngo Din Diem. This final act of the unending war, the American
struggle with North Vietnam, would run its bloody course to 1975. Meanwhile
General Douglas Gracey, who had reinstalled the French in Saigon in 1945 and
managed another post-colonial armed struggle between India and Pakistan in
Kashmir, retired from his post as commander-in-chief of Pakistan's army.
Britain and the USA
retained the largest economic and political stakes in the region. Both countries
still counted the new states as important partners in trade. Even though India,
Pakistan and Burma had erected high tariff barriers against foreign goods, the
whole organization of the world economy continued to put them at a massive
disadvantage which would persist until the early twenty-first century. Writing
from Changi jail in 1959, James Puthucheary, once
again a detainee, penned a classic analysis: Ownership and Control in the
Malayan Economy. It argued that the British still dominated 'commanding heights
and much of the valleys' of the Malayan economy, and that the British had
removed much of the sting of this by bringing in Malay directors and Chinese
investors. As is now acknowledged, 'crony capitalism' - the scourge of modern
corporate Asia - cut its teeth in the British and Japanese periods. The
imperial past still shaped borders. The exclusion of Singapore from the Malayan
federation was to be briefly reversed in 1963, when, with North Borneo and
Sarawak, it joined the Federation of Malaysia. Although this experiment was not
predetermined to fail, the reasons for Singapore's departure in 1965 - the
alarm of Malay elites that its volatile Chinese politics would upset the
delicate balance of power on the peninsula was foreshadowed by events in 1946
and 1947. The political compromises of the transfer of power were to, unravel
as ethnic tensions rose, and in 1969 Malaysia experienced race riots on a scale
it had not seen since 1945. It would face the need for a second, deeper
decolonization in which the state would affirm the centrality of the Malay
language and culture and drive forward the ethnic distribution within the
economy. In Singapore the new independent regime of the People's Action Party
would also have to seek new ways to reconstruct Singaporean society and shift
the course of national development.
Chin Peng who in December1949 helped to write a declaration of
intent of the Malay Communist Party: the establishment of a People's Democratic
Republic of Malaya, later conceded, this was perhaps a mistake: 'Our battle-cry
should have been: Independence for Malaya and all Malayans who want
independence.' (Naw, Aung San, pp. 191-2).
In 1998, fifty years
after the outbreak of the Malayan revolution, Chin Peng began a series of
journeys. At this point his countrymen had seen only four images of him: at the
victory parade in January 1946 when Louis Mountbatten pinned the Burma Star on
his jungle fatigues; a grainy photograph on the poster that offered a quarter
of million dollars for him, dead or alive; then there was Chin Peng at Baling,
looking like a young clerk on his day off in baggy trousers and a short-sleeved
shirt; then nothing for thirty-four years until he appeared at the Haadyai peace talks of 1989, an elderly man now, a little
overweight, in a smart business suit, but entirely composed in the full glare
of the world's media. There, in fluent Malay, he had pledged allegiance to the
King of Malaysia, and his deputy Abdullah C. D. urged Malaysians to unite in
the cause of social justice. But in June 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of
the Emergency, Chin Peng appeared in London. This excited some comment in the
British press, but was unreported in Malaysia, and the subject of only a short
notice in the Singapore Straits Times. There he travelled to the Public Record
Office at Kew; where, in a curious circumlocution of history, the insurgent
entered the imperial archives surrounded by dozens of other visitors
researching their family histories, Chin Peng began a paper trail through his
own past. He took pencil notes from the newly opened files of Special
Operations Executive; of missions of which he had been a part during the war;
of the first agreements in the Malayan jungle between the Malayan Communist
Party and South East Asia Command, signed by the traitor Lai Teck; and other
names, other betrayals. It began a short odyssey of meetings and interviews
with writers and scholars in London, Canberra and, eventually, even Singa pore, many of them adversaries, retired policemen and
soldiers. Some years later, with the heavy editorial hand of a retired
correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, his memories would be woven into a memoir
entitled My Side of History.
Permission for Chin
Peng to return home however, was refused – and seeking to fulfill his
obligation to honor his parents' graves - was forced in 2004 to challenge the
government of Malaysia in the Malaysian courts with breaking the Had-yai agreement. He has yet to have his day in court. As this
controversy rumbled on, in 2005, a Malay writer and film-maker, Amir Muhammad,
born after the Emergency had ended, shot a documentary that traced, through
interviews and music, a voyage from Chin Peng's childhood home of Sitiawan and other parts of Perak to the veterans' villages
in south Thailand. Chin Peng himself did not appear. The film, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, 'The Last Communist', was released in the wake of
the sixtieth anniversary of the ruling party, UMNO. Its old veterans warned
that 'old wounds will bleed again', and the film was eventually banned in
Malaysia.
In Burma it was a
combination of unending internal conflict and foreign intervention which led to
the rise and seemingly endless rule of the military in a country which had once
been one of the brightest hopes for Asian prosperity. Burma had all but become
one of the first 'failed states', as piously categorized by Western political
scientists.
In February 2007, the
Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), suffered a serious split when a high-profile
general defected this February, just a few months after the death of former
leader Bo Mya. But despite decades of fighting, and the undoubted hardships
that local villagers have suffered as a result, there is still an amazing level
of civilian support for the KNLA. Part of this support is undoubtedly due to
the fact that currently the KNLA is primarily a defensive force, and spends a
lot of its time helping Karen civilians across the border to safety. This poses
a difficulty for Thai politicians, for after they are caught by the Thai
authorities refugees are often made to wait for days without food and water
before they are deported back to Burma. Also in Bangkok, where many Karen’s
hold official UN refugee status identification, they are still subject to
searches and bribes by the police there. The resettlement programme
in third country is a very lengthy process and only special cases will be
considered seriously. But it is also Thai business owners, who do not like to
register illegal workers because it's not in their interest to pay proper
wages.
One solution of
course would be to make Burma safer for minorities to return but none of the
neighboring countries China India and Thailand to mention three, feel they
‘gain more economically’ by supporting the Burmese Military.
In 2005 however
Thailand did pass a law trough that refugees can go to a local school, as far
they exist. Pictured Feb. 2007, Karen students at Ban Sop Moei,
most of whom are without citizenship, line up before school:
On 23 March 1947,
standing beneath a huge illuminated map of the continent, Nehru opened the
Asian Relations Conference with the words: 'When the history of our present
times comes to be written, this Conference may well stand out as the landmark
which divides the past of Asia from the future.' From the Levant to China was
represented: there were delegations of Jews and Arabs from Palestine;
commissars from Soviet central Asia; courtiers from the Kingdom of Thailand;
hardened communist guerrillas from Malaya, and polished Kuomintang diplomats.
The greater number of delegates were from the lands of Britain 's imperial
crescent, and the official language of the meeting was English, but the largest
individual contingents were from Southeast Asia. Few of the 200 delegates and
10,000 or so observers were known to each other. Nehru and many other Indian
leaders felt that they had brought Asia to the threshold of a new millennium.
(T.A. Keenleyside, 'Nationalist Indian attitudes towards Asia: a troublesome
legacy for post-Independence Indian foreign policy', Pacific Affairs, 55,
2,1982, pp. 210-30).
The closing session
was addressed by Gandhi, who arrived following a tour of Bihar and Bengal,
where he was trying to stem the tide of communal violence. 'He looked', recalled
one witness from Malaya, Philip Hoalim, 'very tired
and extremely frail'. The Mahatma was an inspiration, but, in the words of Abu Hanifah from Sumatra: 'We thought the idea of turning the
other cheek was silly. We had then preferred the ways of Kemal Ataturk”--the
WWI hero of what later came became known as Turkey. (Abu Hanifah,
Tales of a revolution: a leader of the Indonesian revolution looks back,
Sydney, 1972, p. 236).
The regional entity
that was later to emerge, in the shape of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations in 1967, in fact was much smaller, and next three years Nehru was
plagued with doubts about whether India would survive at all. Lasting well into
coming November 1947, riots and killing continued marked by military precision and
unbelievable sadism: in some cases whole train loads of innocents were burned
alive or disemboweled. In spite of the conspiracy theories that abound about
it; Sir Cyril Radcliffe was dependent on maps and on the evidence given to him
by the local political parties, with all their communal and factional biases.
Whatever he ruled, most Muslims were likely to be outraged and no one would be
entirely satisfied. (Joya Chatterji, 'The fashioning
of a frontier: the Radcliffe line and Bengal 's border landscape, 1947-52',
Modern Asian Studies, 33, I ,1999, pp. 185-243).
The British boundary
force policing the division ordained by Sir Cyril Radcliffe's commission was
too small and ineffective to make much difference. Also in northeastern India,
members of recently armed and self-aware nationalities such as the Nagas,
Lushai and Chin, sought autonomy and looked with suspicion on the new
nation-states. Local politicians agonized over the fate of what had come to be
called India 's 'Mongolian fringe'. (Statesman, Calcutta, 5 May 1947).
Hindu politicians in
Assam felt they had a 'refugee problem' as poor Muslim squatters from eastern
Bengal grew in numbers, allegedly enticed into the province by the local Muslim
League to bolster its case for Assam to be incorporated into East Pakistan.
(Statesman, 10 May 1947).
Burmese Arakan suffered not only separatist and communist
movements, but also the attempts of Muslim parties to annex their populations
to East Pakistan. Nowhere down the length of the crescent did relinquished or
devolved British authority pass quietly into the hands of homogeneous
nation-states. The divisions of colonial politics were to scarify the region
for two generations. In Bengal people came only slowly to understand the
imminence of partition and even after the event most could not believe that
their homeland had been irrevocably sundered into a crazy geographer's
nightmare, preferring instead to believe that their Hindu or Muslim leaders
would see their error and help to unite the region again. Somewhat
surprisingly, support for this sort of idea came from the leader of the local
Muslim-dominated ministry, H. Suhrawardy. The chief minister, the local Muslim
League and allied politicians were acutely aware that millions of Muslim
peasants would suffer if partition actually came about. They feared, correctly,
that any 'East Pakistan' without Calcutta would be an economic disaster area.
The partition agitation, asserted Suhrawardy, was a move by the 'propertied
classes' to serve their own interests. (Statesman,1 May 1947).
He even managed to
prevail on Jinnah to moderate his demands that Pakistan should include the
whole of Bengal to see whether the unity plan got off the ground. Bose and
Suhrawardy were both to be disappointed. The majority of the middle-class Hindu
politicians opposed any move that would maintain a Muslim preponderance in
Bengal 's politics. Their most vocal leader, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee,
denounced the 'ten year communal raj' that the Muslims were said to have
imposed since the 1935 constitutional reforms. Throughout the early part of
1947 the Hindu middle classes presented petitions and held public meetings to
demand partition. The main Hindu organization, Hindu Mahasabha, the Bengal
Chamber of Commerce, and the vast majority of local associations in which
Hindus predominated pressed for separation. Mookherjee
characterized the Bengali 'paradise to come' promised by Suhrawardy as simply
more of the 'hell that exists in Bengal today', the result, he argued, of the
chief minister's well-documented maladministration and the Muslim League's
'campaign of hatred’. (Statesman, 2 May 1947)
Bengal indeed
remained a kind of hell. If the conditions of ordinary people hadnot been so desperate it is possible that the Bengal
assembly might not have voted for partition later in the summer. By now,
though, even the representatives of the poor, low-caste Hindu peasants of the
east of the province who had previously shared interests with the Muslim
peasantry were alarmed and apprehensive. Communist organizers tried to persuade
the peasantry that it was an alliance of bosses, imperialists and landlords who
were fomenting the communal rioting. They had some success in northeast Bengal.
Curfews were regularly imposed on Calcutta and other cities while magistrates
banned groups marching in shirts of 'a certain color', presumably a reference
to the green and saffron hues favored by Muslim and Hindu agitators,
respectively. (People's Age, Bombay, 20 April, 18 May 1947).
By 1947 probably a
majority of Nagas were Christian, and American Baptist missionaries protected
them against the British civil administration and encouraged them to evolve an
identity as a chosen people of God, distinct from the pagans of the Assam
valley. An excellent account of this can be found in Julian Jacobs with Alan
Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison and Anita Herle, Hill
peoples of northeast India, the Nagas: society, culture and the colonial
Encounter (Stuttgart, 1990, pp. 151-70).
This sense of
separate identity had been strengthened during the war when many of them had
fought against the Japanese on the Allied side. British officers had armed them
and taught them that they were independent people and owed nothing to the
seditious nationalists of the plains. Naga political associations gradually
came into being, some pressing for local autonomy, some for outright
independence. In July 1947, a delegation came to meet the Congress leadership
and seek guarantees for an independent Nagaland. Initially Gandhi seemed to
accept this, stating that Congress wanted no one to be forced into the Indian
Union. But by August the Congress leaders were rattled by the prospect that
riot and secession would fragment the whole subcontinent. Their position
hardened, provoking some Naga leaders to declare their own declaration of
independence on 14 August. In contrast to the wild celebrations elsewhere in
India, very few attended the flag hoisting in Nagaland. The messianic
prophetess Gaidiliu, who had led a Naga rebellion
against the British in 1930, remained in prison until 1948 at the behest of the
suspicious Indian authorities.
In the northeast
meanwhile Dacca was designated the capital of East Pakistan. Already tense from
minor communal incidents, the town was sadly lacking in facilities for the
large number of Muslim clerks and officials who were congregating there from
all over Bengal. The residence of the former Nawab of Dacca was commandeered as
Government House while a British army barracks became the secretariat building
and dormitory home for 3,500 disgruntled clerks.
Independence in
Bengal was an even more shambolic affair than it was in Delhi. A few days
before 15 August the Calcutta Corporation renamed three streets in the city centre 'Netaji Subhas Bose Street', souring the occasion
for the British. C. Rajagopalachari, the moderate Madras Congressman who had
been nominated governor of West Bengal, also showed little inclination to
respect British traditions. He entered the splendor of the throne room of
Government House for his swearing-in dressed simply in homespun dhoti and cap.
Perhaps it was just as well. On 15 August a huge crowd waving Congress flags
and shouting 'Jai Hind!' invaded the building, stirred to action, it was
rumored, by Sarat Bose. They swarmed through the
governor's quarters seizing everything from door handles to table ornaments as
mementos. The police removed them only after several hours by throwing tear-gas
canisters into the building. In the meantime, the outgoing governor and his
family beat a hasty and ignominious retreat. As Arthur Dash recalled it,
'someone who recognized him jammed a Gandhi cap on his head and the last
British Governor went out of Government House by a side door so crowned and
with his wife waving the new Dominion (late Congress Party) flag.(Dash, Bengal
Diary, vol. IX, p. 106, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge).
Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri related that out in the district town of
Barishal his father had kept awake throughout the
night of 14 August with a gun in his hand. The disturbances he feared did not
come that night, but they came soon enough. (Quoted in Romonthon
Atharba Bhimratipraptar paracharit cllarcha, Calcutta,
1993, p. 98).
On his way to London, Aung
San flew on ahead of the delegation to meet Indian leaders and stayed at
Nehru's house in Delhi between 2 and 6 January. Nehru and Aung San had struck
up a friendship when the RAF 'reds' had flown the Indian leader into Rangoon on
his way to meet Mountbatten. Nehru eulogized Aung San to the Indian press.
Wavell, now in his final weeks as viceroy, invited him to lunch. He was less
complimentary: 'He struck me as a suspicious, ignorant but determined little
tough.'(Angelene Naw, Aung
San and the struggle for Burmese independence (Copenhagen, 2001), p. 186).
This underestimated
Aung San's growing political sophistication. Passing through Karachi, he had
arranged to meet Jinnah. In fact Aung San remained suspicious of British
intentions, replying in a non-committal way to Indian journalists' questions
about whether he would resort to non-violent or armed rebellion should the
London talks fail. He also alluded to the contemporary situation in Indo-China,
where Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese republic was fighting for its life against
French reaction. (Dawn, Karachi, 6 January 1947).
The end of the war
had revived the Burmese fear of being 'swarmed' by Indian immigrants, as one of
their delegates later put it. At his press conference, Aung San declared that
'Indian vested interests -like any vested interests - are not in favor of
independence.' (New York Times, 6 January 1947).
The critical point
during the India-Burma Committee Cabinet meeting on 22 January 1947 in London
according to Kyaw Nyein, was not so much British commercial interests in Burma
as the status of the hill areas. It was no use getting independence unless
these territories and peoples were firmly welded to the new state. Three
generations of British officials, commercial agents and missionaries had sought
to deny it - control over the ethnic minorities. As with the Indian princes,
though not the Indian Muslims, the British simply abandoned their long-term
clients in the face of political reality. Aung San was deeply suspicious of the
British Frontier Service officers and Tom Driberg
increased his alarm by saying that even one British government representative
at Panglong might encourage the more recalcitrant sawbwas
or minority tribal leaders to hold out for too much. (Hugh Tinker (ed.), Burma.
The struggle for independence 1944-48, vol. II: From general strike to
independence, 31 August 1946 to 4 January 1948, London, 1984, pp. 271-84).
Economic
disagreements were significant, too, even though they seemed less pressing than
the security issues. The AFPFL wanted a full-blown nationalization plan as any
compromise on this might hand the communists a propaganda victory. The British
cabinet wanted enterprises such as Burmah Oil to
remain private. Apart from the question of profits, ministers noted that Burmah Oil was currently dependent on another British
company, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, for marketing and distribution. The
last thing anyone needed that bitter winter in a shivering and malnourished
Britain and Europe was an interruption of fuel supplies. (Tinker, Burma, vol.
II, pp. 242-3).
Nationalization was
to remain a contentious issue between the British and the Burmese for several
years. Nationalization was to remain a contentious issue between the British
and the Burmese for several years. Thakin Nu even
complained to Rance that the British were dropping
arms to the Karens as a preliminary to a full-scale
revolt, a rumour that Rance
had explicitly to deny. On 27 January, the British government announced the
successful conclusion of the negotiations for Burmese independence. A smiling
Aung San, accompanied by Attlee and Tin Tut, emerged onto the steps of 10
Downing Street to speak to the world's press. Burma would be independent in
January 1948. (Naw, Aung San, pp. 188-9)
The night before he returned
to Burma Aung San had met Tom Driberg who said that
it would be best to slay in the Commonwealth, and Aung apparently answered that
he could not persuade his people. (Tom Driberg,
Ruling passions, London, 1978, p. 217).
Meanwhile Burma
Governor Rance was to bowe
to force majeure, noting that 12,000 Indian troops were scheduled to leave
Burma in February 1947 and there would be no replacements. He urged the
immediate passage of a House of Commons amending bill to expand the powers of
the present govcrnmcnt to include those formerly
retained by the governor. Thus the AFPFL leadership was abruptly invited to
London after New Year. (Rance, in Tinker, Burma, vol.
II, pp. 139-44).
Meanwhile Than Tun,
the most outspoken of the communist leaders, announced a parting of the ways:
'Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant
the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathizers, who
constituted the country.’ Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership
accused the communists of starting a 'whispering campaign' against Aung San
and, less believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil
administration against the 'socialists', that is, the moderates. The only
reason that the AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most
now really believed that Attlee's government would concede independence early
in the new year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting
into personal and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe, who had done much to build up communist cells in the
north of the country, had begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of
collaboration with the British and of 'right-wing deviationism'. He had been
suspicious of much of the leadership since they had gone along with the deal
that Aung San had worked out in Kandy back in September 1945 for the absorption
of the BNA into a reorganized British force. (Extract from The Burman, 3
November 1946, 643/38, TNA, cited in Tinker, p.105).
Burmese supporters in
London were put on their guard in October when a Karen 'goodwill mission'
arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge's Hotel by no
less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence. And as the
AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British intelligence
warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early October.
Though this had no immediate impact on Burmese politics, the rise of communism
throughout Asia weighed heavily on the minds of the British and the AFPFL
leadership. Equally alarming was Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh conflict in
India. Burma had seen comparable 'communal' outbreaks between Buddhists and
Muslims in the 1930’s. In a lengthy interview with Reuters, Aung San deplored
China 's civil war and India 's communalism. Events in China might lead to a
Third World War, he said, while both conflicts would 'retard Asiatic unity and
security'. (Reuter interview with Bogyoke Aung San,
16 December 1946', in Tinker, Burma, vol. II, p. 194).
On 13 December
General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, had sent a particularly
gloomy assessment of the situation to his superiors. For political reasons,
Indian troops could not now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of 'doubtful
reliability'. And the British forces were 'weak' and could not hold the
situation. The evidence suggests that Briggs painted the situation to be as
dire as he could because he agreed with Rance and,
more distantly, Mountbatten on the need for an immediate statement about the
date of independence. (John H. McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, 1945-48, 1990, pp.
75-90).
By October 1946 the
Burmese furthermore were sorely aware that the British had effectively handed
power to India. And Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of
Indians in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians
and other 'foreigners' voting on their constitution. Privately, Churchill was
furious that a British government was even considering parleying with someone
whom he regarded as a 'quisling' and a 'fascist' such as Aung San. (McEnery,
Epilogue in Burma, pp. 95-6).
Before the Japanese
surrendered in August 1945, their last political act was to recognize a more
radical government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh. The incoming Chinese forces of
Chiang Kai Shek also preferred a friendly independent
Vietnamese government to the re-establishment of colonial rule. From the
balcony of Hanoi 's baroque opera house, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam under the leadership of the Viet Minh nationalist coalition. He
mixed the language of the American Declaration of Independence with violent
invective against the French: 'They have built more prisons than schools. They
have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers
of blood ... To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.'
For nearly nine months the new regime was to act as a sovereign power,
organizing elections, redistributing land to peasants and trying to combat the
dreadful poverty that followed the famines. The ruling groups that emerged in
distant Saigon were formally subordinate to the new regime in Hanoi. The two
major leaders in the south were the communists Tran Van Giau
and Dr Pham Ngoc Thach, the heads of the shaky local Viet Minh coalition which
jostled for power with other armed popular groupings. The nationalists in
Saigon tried to persuade Count Terauchi to arm them: 'You are defeated, now it
is our turn to fight the white imperialists.Terauchi
refused to surrender Japanese arms, but seems to have allowed French ones to
find their way to the Viet Minh. The situation was extraordinarily tense. The
new government had some arms but had little sway beyond the outskirts of
Saigon. In Cholon, Saigon 's twin port city, French
and Chinese business communities subsisted uneasily with a mafia-like
organization called the Binh Xuyen.
Up towards the mountain-goddess shrine of Tay Ninh on
the Cambodian border it was the Cao Dai, a religious sect armed by the
Japanese, who held power. (David Marr, Vietnam 1945, Berkeley, 1995, p. 135-
458; See also John Springhall, “Kicking out the
Vietminh: how Britain allowed France to reoccupy south Indochina', Journal of Contemporm History, 40, I, 2005, pp. 115-30).
June 1945 more than
35,000 Japanese POWs had been repatriated to Japan; the same number, however,
remained behind and they were increasingly used as strike breakers and guards
as the internal situation deteriorated. The graves of more than 8,000 Thai
laborers could be identified. But alongside these 15,000 known victims were the
unmarked graves of anything from 30,000 to 80,000 Burmese, Chinese, Indian,
Malayan and Indonesian laborers. Most of them had been forced into service.
They had died of disease, starvation or as a result of Japanese brutality. And
in Singapore, the Upper East Coast Road, a site of the massacres during the
Japanese 'screening' of the Chinese, was a telok kurau, a haunted hill. The absence of remains was an
obstacle to the performance of rites to appease the 'hungry ghosts' of the
ancestors. An atmosphere of acute psychic crisis arose. Taoist priests,
according to a report in the Straits Times, 'peered into the underworld' and
saw 'thousands of naked hungry and discontented ghosts roaming about the earth,
their wrath threatening calamity to the land'. (See Fujio Hara, Malayan Chinese
and China, Singapore, 2003).
In India British
officers where to contemplated the once unthinkable demise of the Raj were beset
by mounting worries. Nehru's emotional attachment to the princely state of
Kashmir seemed the most likely cause of conflict between the two new dominions,
no one knew whether it was going to join India or Pakistan. While in Burma
Governor Rance bowed to force majeure, noting that
12,000 Indian troops were scheduled to leave Burma in February 1947 and there
would be no replacements. He urged the immediate passage of a House of Commons
amending bill to expand the powers of the present government to include those
formerly retained by the governor. Thus the AFPFL leadership was abruptly
invited to London after New Year. (Rance, in Tinker,
Burma, vol. II, pp. 139-44).
The goal was to keep
Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If they were to go to
London, Aung San and his supporters had to be assured of total success. Any
temporizing by the British would compromise them completely. It would mean
handing the leadership of Burmese nationalism to one or other of the communist
factions. British power was already declining rapidly, but this was a decisive
moment in the history of Burma and, arguably, in that of South and Southeast
Asia as a whole. If Burma had become a communist state on independence, as
later happened in Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia might have taken a very
different course. Certainly, with the 'cold weather' of 1946-7 approaching, the
communists were in a restive mood. Their aim, like their confreres in Vietnam,
was to take over and dominate a coalition of nationalist forces. If they could
not do this, they would adopt the tactics of the communists in China; they
would go underground and fight the nationalists, denouncing them as stooges of
imperialism. Fortunately for the AFPFL, the Burmese communists split into
ideological and personal factions, with neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese
model triumphing. In the longer term it was to be military nationalists who
would win out. As relations between the moderates and the communists worsened
with the collapse of the strikes during October, the AFPFL voted to expel the
communists. (Angelene Naw,
Aung San and the struggle for Burmese independence, Copenhagen, 2001, pp.
177-81).
By October 1946 the
Burmese would be sorely aware that the British had effectively handed power to
India. And Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of Indians
in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians and
other 'foreigners' voting on their constitution. At the same time the British
saw turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal
violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and
gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British
troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the Dutch
East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was 'gloomy'. The British civilian
services were on the whole in favor of independence, but were now concerned
about the welfare of their wives and children and their own future employment.
Than Tun, the most
outspoken of the communist leaders, announced a parting of the ways: 'Yes, all
Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true
welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathizers, who constituted
the country.’ Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership accused the
communists of starting a 'whispering campaign' against Aung San and, less
believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil administration
against the 'socialists', that is, the moderates. The only reason that the
AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most now really
believed that Attlee's government would concede independence early in the new
year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting into personal
and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe,
who had done much to build up communist cells in the north of the country, had
begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of collaboration with the British and of
'right-wing deviationism'. He had been suspicious of much of the leadership
since they had gone along with the deal that Aung San had worked out in Kandy
back in September 1945 for the absorption of the BNA into a reorganized British
force. (Extract from The Burman, 3 November 1946, 643/38, TNA, cited in Tinker,
p. 105).
Burmese supporters in
London were briefly put on their guard in October when a Karen 'goodwill
mission' arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge's Hotel
by no less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence. And as
the AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British
intelligence warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early
October. Though this had no immediate impact on Burmese politics, the rise of
communism throughout Asia weighed heavily on the minds of the British and the
AFPFL leadership.
In fact events were
now moving very fast. When Sir Gilbert Laithwaite,
was sent to Burma to discuss the AFPFL leaders' visit to London and concluded
of Aung San: 'I think business could be done.' Churchill was furious that a
British government was even considering parleying with someone whom he regarded
as a 'quisling' and a 'fascist' such as Aung San. (McEnery, Epilogue in Burma,
pp. 95-6).
On 13 December
General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, sent a gloomy assessment of
the situation to his superiors. For political reasons, Indian troops could not
now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of 'doubtful reliability'. And the
British forces were 'weak' and could not hold the situation. The evidence suggests
that Briggs painted the situation to be as dire as he could because he agreed
with Rance and, more distantly, Mountbatten on the
need for an immediate statement about the date of independence. (John H.
McEnery, Epilogue in Burma, I945-48, 1990, pp. 75-90).
Equally alarming was
Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh conflict in India, Burma had seen comparable
'communal' outbreaks between Buddhists and Muslims in the 1930’s. In a lengthy
interview with Reuters, Aung San deplored China 's civil war and India 's
communalism. Events in China might lead to a Third World War, he said, while
both conflicts would 'retard Asiatic unity and security'. (Reuter interview
with Bogyoke Aung San, 16 December 1946', in Tinker,
Burma, vol. II, p. 194).
In fact the British saw
turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal
violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and
gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British
troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the
Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was 'gloomy'. The British
civilian services were on the whole in favour of
independence, but were now concerned about the welfare of their wives and
children and their own future employment.
But it was India that
hovered gruesomely before Aung San’s eyes as he set off to London on a British
Overseas Aircraft Corporation flight on the second day of 1947.
In 1955 few could
argue that Malaya was 'not yet ready' for independence. One of the first public
functions of the new chief minister, with six of his colleagues, was to
represent the government at the diamond jubilee of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore.
When Ibrahim succeeded his father in 1895, the Malay States had not yet
entirely submitted to British rule. He had inherited from his father a
vigorous, reforming monarchy, and in accepting British 'protection', he still
retained many of his privileges and even his own armed forces. The sultan had
spent little time in Malaya since the war, having been mostly away in Europe.
He had returned briefly in 1951 only to complain of the 'most damnable' noise
of RAF flights over his palace, and had requested them to avoid his capital
altogether; it reminded him too much of 1941. Less than six weeks after his
return he set sail again for England. (The Times, London, 3 October 1951).
But in 1955 he was
met with a splendid gathering; the crowds that streamed across the causeway
from Singapore were so immense that traffic could not cross. The sultan gave a
speech in his trademark mixture of English and Malay. He spoke in forthright
tones, striking the floor with the end of his sword as he did so. 'I don't like
it at all,' he said. 'My head is disturbed. I say if I remain here, I shall
probably go mad - thinking of my people.' He continued: It is easy to say I
want independence. I want to be happy. I can buy slaves. I myself do not buy
slaves. But I know there are people who buy human beings. It is not that we do
not want to ask for Merdeka. We too, do not want to ask for Merdeka? We ask for
it - Then we ask for independence. But what? Why do we want independence? Where
are our warships? Where is our army? Where are our planes which can repel an
invading army? ('HH the Sultan of Johore's speech', in MacGillivray to
Lennox-Boyd, 19 September 1955, COI030/374, TNA).
In Singapore a
coalition led by the Labour Front of David Marshall
achieved a similar status. On arriving to begin work, both of the new chief
ministers found that the British had not seen fit to provide them with offices.
Marshall - who horrified the governor of Singapore with his trademark
open-necked bush jacket and the bare feet and sandals of some of his ministers
- only prevailed when he threatened to set up shop 'under the old apple tree'
outside the government offices in Empress Place. It was here that he introduced
his ministers to the people. (Chan Heng Chee, A sensation of independence: a
political biography of David Marshall, Singapore, 1984, pp. 93-4).
But however
constrained the new regimes were, across the Thai border the MCP leadership
realized that they placed in jeopardy the legitimacy of their claims to fight
for the nation. Through intermediaries, Secretary general of the Malayan
Communist Party Chin Peng (Communist liaison officer with Force 136 in Perak),
sued for peace. Initially the Chinese for 'Force 136', were recruited
from Kuomintang circles; in Chiang Kai Shek's capital, Chungking. They were, by definition, staunch
enemies of the communists, but on landing in Malaya the Malayan Communist sent
some of its most committed cadres to join them. The communist leadership was
represented by, a man the British called 'the Plen',
and who signed the agreement as 'Chang Hong'. During a meeting, in mid April 1945, it seems that British officers of 'Force
136' promised that, in return for support, the Malayan Communist Party would be
able to operate legally as a political party after the war. The Malayan
Communist Party, was under the leadership of a man known as 'Mr Wright' alias 'Chang Hong' who led the April 1945
negotiations. This was later disavowed, but most communists assumed that the
concession had been won, and so too did many British officials.
The fighting units
drew back, and with a small bodyguard Chin Peng, the Malay leader Rashid Maidin and another veteran of the wartime resistance, Chen
Tian, were met at the jungle fringe by an old Force 136 comrade, John Davis. On
28-29 December 1955 a meeting took place in the frontier town of Baling, in a
schoolhouse commandeered for the purpose. It was a condition of the gathering
that Chin Peng, on whom the British had already placed a $250,000 reward, would
not be allowed to speak to the press. A young Malay correspondent of Utusan Melayu, Said Zahari, was a witness: 'In the midst of the dashing lights
of photographers' cameras, I saw apprehensive looks on the faces of the
communist leaders. Chin Peng and Rashid Maidin looked
straight and stiff, while Chen Tian turned rapidly to the left and to the right
as if to avoid the cameras.' (Said Zahari, Dark
clouds at dawn, Kuala Lumpur, 2001, p. 285.).
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