Forgotten Wars (76 page)

In retrospect, Furnivall’s speech did in fact mark something of a turning point. Over the next few months Nu edged closer to Western interests and moderated his government’s leftist economic policies. A new charter was approved which allowed foreign companies to operate in the country for up to ten years, with the reasonable expectation that they would be able to make profits and repatriate a proportion of them. The land nationalization policy was loosened; it was anyway beginning to create large numbers of small private owners – a new rural elite, rather than the peasant co-operative that had been envisaged. The government made strenuous efforts to meet the requirements that the British Treasury had hedged around the offer of a large sterling loan. Insofar as they gave a thought to Burmese matters amid labour unrest, sterling crises and the onward march of international communism, Attlee and Cripps, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to take a rosier view of the Burmese government.

Britain was, at least physically, distant from Burma’s problems, but the Republic of India had inherited that acute sense of menace about the security of its borders which had long plagued the British Raj. As if to symbolize this, Jawaharlal Nehru lived in Parliament Street, New Delhi, in the very house that had once been occupied by the commander-in-chief of the old colonial army. Nehru’s moments for reflection were few in the early months of 1949, though the anniversaries first of Gandhi’s assassination and next of Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday punctuated his heavy workload. Linked by an accident of chronology, the memories of India’s apostle of non-violence and the warrior martyr were to march in unlikely companionship into India’s future. Nehru’s education as a world statesman had been brutal. Less than five years earlier he had been writing Indian history in a British jail. On his release he had plunged into a final vigorous campaign to push the British out. Cripps and Attlee had assented and
he mended battered personal friendships with them, but the price of independence and political stability was partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it. Although by 1949 the worst massacres had ceased and the flood of refugees into India had abated, the subcontinent remained tense. Thousands still crossed the borders of East Pakistan and West Bengal as poverty and communal tension drove people to seek security with their co-religionists. In the west, fighting with Pakistan over the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir had reached a deadlock. Pakistani fighters had clawed their way to unofficial rule over half of the state, which they called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), but they could make no further headway. Neither country was prepared to give way, even though internal food and financial crises meant that neither could afford the burden of war.

Historians sometimes write as if a sturdy and reliable British Raj had been transformed overnight into an equally dominant Indian secular state. Nothing can be further from the truth. Like the Raj, the Indian Union had feet of clay and that clay was only hardening as troubles poured down on the new state in 1947 and 1948. In April Thakin Nu wrote to Nehru to plead for financial and military aid to halt his country’s disintegration; already Rangoon was in control of only little more than a third of the old British Burma. Nehru replied frankly: India was itself on the rack. Partition, the influx of refugees and war with Pakistan had reduced India’s military competence drastically. There was no way in which India could equip ten battalions of Burmese troops to fight the rebels. Military supply, communications and control had all been compromised by the division of the old colonial army. It was no longer the great fighting force it had once been. India itself was scouring the world for military spare parts at knockdown rates. So great was the military and financial burden, Nehru wrote, that ‘it would not have been surprising if that new state [India] collapsed under the burden’.
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The international scene was now even more dangerous: ‘The whole of Asia is in a state of turmoil and revolution.’ Nehru insisted that he did not fear revolution but he worried that constant war would irrevocably diminish the people’s standard of living, which it had been the main aim of the national movements to improve: ‘We have barely escaped disaster ourselves in the last year and a half.’ This was why India had stayed in the
Commonwealth and was about to renew its membership, despite the political taint of association with the British. This was also why Lord Mountbatten had been asked to stay on as Governor General and the ‘steel frame’ of the old Indian Civil Service had largely been maintained.

Nehru had good cause for concern. The Dutch had only just begun to pull back from their ‘police action’ against Indonesian nationalists, influenced by the stance of the US government and perhaps marginally by the fierce denunciations of Dutch policy at the Asian summit in New Delhi in March. About the same time, Chiang Kai Shek was driven from power in China and the French launched a massive attack against the Viet Minh forces in their ‘liberated zones’ west of Hanoi. It was not clear whether revived imperialism or rogue communism was the greater danger to the new Asia. With all the naivety of a refined left-wing academic, Nehru had admired the scientific and social progress of Stalin’s Soviet Union, oblivious of the mass murder which had sustained it. But he was much more cautious about communism nearer home. As far as communist China was concerned, it was a question of wait and see. He was not in a rush to recognize the new government of Mao Zedong and only did so some time after Burma’s own recognition. He worried about the possibility of Chinese communist incursions into Indian territory and privately conceded that India might have to fight them off. He was beginning to develop an amicable relationship with China’s new foreign minister, Chou En Lai, but demurred about taking a strong leadership role in South and Southeast Asia in case that might be seen in Beijing as a hostile move against China.

If Nehru was ambivalent about Chinese communism at this stage, he was downright hostile to Indian, Malayan and Burmese communists, regarding the Burmese variety in particular as ‘freebooters and terrorists’.
¹³
The background for this attitude was the situation in India itself. Communist insurrectionists did not have much of a track record in India. There had been agitation in north Bengal in the 1930s, but the Communist Party of India had lost ground when, under orders from Moscow, it had backed the British war effort. But Soviet bosses alone were not to blame for Indian communism’s failings. Indian communists excelled at ranting in coffee shops, but did not seem to
be the stuff of the vanguard of the proletariat. Their leadership rallied mass support only in exceptionally propitious circumstances, such as the old state of Hyderabad, especially its alienated Telugu-speaking tract of Telengana. Here the Nizam of Hyderabad’s regime seemed to offer a textbook illustration of Marxist ‘feudal despotism’. Young revolutionaries had seized on peasant grievances and begun to organize rural soviets and people’s courts in classic style. When Hyderabad was absorbed into the Indian Union in 1948, the situation actually deteriorated. So-called
razakars
, bands of toughs who had been recruited by the Nizam as a kind of ‘Black and Tan’ force to put down the communist rebellion, joined in a mêlée of looting and assassination of landlords. The trouble seemed likely to spread into other parts of the Indian Union. Delhi took tough action against the rebels and an Indian press, tamer in many respects than that which had operated under the British, denounced the revolutionaries and bandits.
¹⁴

Events at home warmed Nehru to Nu’s position on communist insurgency in Burma. The Indian prime minister’s attitudes were also informed by his fears for the more than 800,000 Indians still living under Nu’s government.
¹⁵
He did not seek a ‘Greater India’ and had at this point deliberately distanced himself from the overseas imperial ambitions of the Raj. But since the Burmese refugee tragedy of 1942 he had worried about Indians overseas, a fear that was reinforced by a spate of vicious riots against Indians in South Africa after the white supremacists of the National Party took power there in 1948. Early in 1949 Nehru gave the go-ahead for the army to evacuate 4,000 Indians from the Karen stronghold of Insein, a mere six miles from Rangoon.
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Next on his list of potential victims were the 30,000 Indians in the rich sugar-growing Ziawadi estate in southern Burma.
¹⁷
This was an old colony of farmers from Bihar that the British had settled there several generations earlier. They were now prosperous cash-crop growers and moneylenders who attracted the hostility of the local communists. Nehru believed that the rebels had not yet targeted Indians, but he was not confident that would remain the case. Not only would systematic assaults on Burma’s Indians inflame public opinion at home, a new influx of refugees would add to the horrendous problem of housing and feeding the millions who had fled from Pakistan. Nehru pointedly thanked Nu for averting a large-scale migration
of the many Sikhs and north Indian settlers who lived around Myitkyina, the airfield town in the north of the country which had been the scene of so many tragic events during the Japanese occupation.
¹⁸

Nehru’s aim was to get the Burmese government and the Karens to negotiate, thus freeing up the government to deal with the communist menace. He was convinced that a simple military solution would not work. He pointed out to Nu that, in Malaya, even after eight months the powerful and well-equipped British army had yet to make much headway against a similar group of ‘freebooters’ and self-styled communists. Yet the situation in Burma seemed to deteriorate further. The communists refused to lay down their arms, despite strenuous efforts by Nu to conciliate them. Worse, the much larger bands of insurgent PVO men seemed unwilling to fall in behind the government again, even though he offered to incorporate them into the national army and initiate a ‘leftist unity programme’. Nu regarded the revolt of the white-flag communists of the PVO the previous year as a stab in the back, but more dangerous yet was the Karen situation. After their initial uprising in 1948, Karen leaders had held their ground and had begun to negotiate with the government through non-political intermediaries. They were awaiting further government commissions on the status of an autonomous ‘Karenistan’ and also a resolution of the issue of the military service of the Karen defence volunteers. Newly instituted discrimination against Karen volunteers for the army must be halted, they insisted. Between November 1948 and January 1949, however, the negotiations collapsed. Karen National Defence Organizations (KNDOs) renewed their assault on Rangoon, occupying dozens of delta villages, driving out or killing headmen and destroying government property. Where they were in a weaker position in the lower Irrawaddy district, the KNDOs made common cause with communist insurgents and helped them to capture a number of towns and cities. Stung by the unexpected coalition between Karens and communists, the government bitterly assailed the Western commentators who had so often claimed that Karen autonomy would help
form a bulwark against communism in Southeast Asia. On the contrary, Karens ‘cooperated fully with both red and white flag communist insurgents to further their interests of a separate state. They invariably released all communist prisoners from the jails overrun by them to increase the difficulties of the government.’
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To add to the government’s woes, the ministerial services union decided to strike for more pay and better conditions on 4 February 1949. Though most of the police stayed at work, government offices across the country ground to a halt. Within a few days the Karen forces were back in Insein, just north of Rangoon. Nu’s government again seemed likely to be the first of the post-colonial governments to fall victim to a coup.

Karen rebel forces remained dangerously close to the capital and the rice harvest seemed in danger. The crisis spurred the government to greater piety. The day officially beginning the Buddhist season of fasting was set aside as a national day of prayer and supplications for peace were chanted in Rangoon and throughout the country. When the Buddha had chanted those prayers thousands of years earlier, war had come to a stop. Relics were paraded through the countryside and Nu visited monasteries, giving alms to the monks and propitiating the
nats
. Divine aid was slow in coming, though. Nu called the months of February, March and April 1949 ‘the bleakest months… all of us were kept in a terrible state of suspense’.
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There were said to be 10,000 rebels in the field under communist or Karen leadership and probably half of these were deserters from the army, police and other services. Even the leaders of the hitherto-loyal PVOs (known as the yellow-band or yellow-flag PVOs to distinguish them from the white-flag communists of the rebellious PVOs) resigned from the government, threatening a new crisis. Nu’s government still controlled little territory beyond the cities of Mandalay and Rangoon.

Yet the important point was that the Burmese government did continue to control the cities. Rangoon, in particular, was vital, for it was through that city that rice exports flowed out to the rest of the world and it was on the rice revenues that the government now depended for most of its income. Ironically, the Karen rebels who could easily have disrupted rice exports from their forward position at Insein did not do so, probably because they too were dependent on
income from rice. In fact, as had been clear after the Japanese invasion of 1942, he who controlled Rangoon controlled Burma. This was perhaps the main reason Nu’s government survived.

Another reason was that some foreign aid became available, but in a form surreptitious enough for the Burmese government to disavow accusations that it was drifting towards the Western alliance. In Rangoon and Mandalay there was still a good deal of suspicion about British aid to the Karens. This was understandable in view of the previous year’s shenanigans and the constant support voiced for the minorities in the British press by former Force 136 officers and other Britons who had served in Burma. Nu was not so worried about losing power to the Karen rebels, whom he saw as less hardline than the communists. The real problem was that a Karen advance against Rangoon might spark a Soviet intervention on the communist side. It was not a far-fetched fear. This was the year in which the USSR attempted to starve out its former allies from Berlin, a blockade that was broken only by high-risk relief sorties flown by Allied pilots. But how could Burma be assisted without handing a propaganda victory to the communists? Both the British and the Indians thought that an initiative by the Commonwealth would be easier for the Burmese government to swallow than one started by either the former colonial master or its huge neighbour.