Forgotten Wars (92 page)

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 1950s 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 tens of millions continued to live in the direst poverty while the first flush 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. Political problems were equally pressing in New Delhi. Once the British left, India’s fractious politicians set about fighting over the spoils of office. 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.

India’s pre-eminent problem was the continuing fight with Pakistan over the Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that Nehru had insisted in 1947 must belong to India. Both countries diverted vital resources to their armed forces, distorting development almost as much as military priorities had done under the Raj. The diplomatic stand-off led to sporadic armed clashes on the borders and, though it did not erode
India’s resolutely civilian political order, the army became more and more visible in the politics of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan came to believe that he could do a better job than quarrelling politicians of bringing India to book over Kashmir and holding his fissiparous country together. Ironically, the legacy of Mahomed Ali Jinnah, that consummate political schemer and master artisan of constitutions and resolutions, was to be decades of military rule in Pakistan. Nowhere were the tensions which undermined the new, uncertain and divided state more evident than in East Pakistan, located at the apex of the former crescent of British Southeast Asia. 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. British anti-communism and American suspicion of India caused them tacitly to support the emerging ‘state of martial rule’ in Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and the ‘softer’ authoritarianism of Malaysia and Singapore.

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.
⁶⁸
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.

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. The wars of the minorities against Rangoon were again partly the legacy of colonial rule, even though the Labour government itself had decided that Burma must be kept together in order to repel Chinese
influence. The British and Americans, of course, had never actively sought to bolster General Ne Win’s rise to power but, as in the case of Ayub Khan of Pakistan, Western politicians were relieved enough when non-communist strongmen came to control poor and conflict-ridden countries. It was not even that Ne Win and the other Burmese generals were entirely
personae nongratae
amongst the post-war Western leaders, despite the harsh words traded by both sides. Britain (and India) had helped to arm Burma in 1949 and 1950 when the government in Rangoon seemed about to fall to the Karen–communist alliance. Ne Win was more than once seen in the company of Malcolm MacDonald. He even dallied in the Commissioner General’s Malayan swimming pool. Thus it had ever been since the days of Thucydides the Athenian, that democracies at home consorted with dictators and became tyrannies abroad, though still cloaking their interests in the rhetoric of ‘spreading democracy’.

As they faced the future, not all the auguries for the crescent and its neighbours were so poor, of course. Independence had given a huge moral boost to the peoples of India, Pakistan and Burma. The sense of release from the grip of European colonialism was palpable, perhaps not least because it had shown some of its worst sides just before and during the early stages of the Second World War. Open racism, economic exploitation and neglect by the European powers reached their high point in the Depression and during the first phase of the war. After 1945 newly independent governments set limits to the privileges of European business in South and Southeast Asia, though nationalization proceeded quite slowly even in Burma. Still, reading the newspapers and memoirs of this period, it becomes apparent that fears for the future were mixed with a sense that the new nations possessed limitless capacity for growth and development. The stilted, sanctimonious yet aspiring language of the Bandung generation amply illustrates this. Even in the surviving enclaves of British government in the crescent, officials paid more attention to the improvement of the health and education of their remaining subjects. Malcolm MacDonald regarded his greatest act to have been the creation of the University of Malaya. A new, high-thinking and Christian imperialism seemed to be taking shape beneath a blanket of counter-insurgency and press censorship. In Malaya and Singapore at
least, decolonization was seen as major success story, as their later prosperity seemed to affirm. Yet it must be remembered that the achievements of colonial rule, such as relatively stable and independent institutions of state, were not solely, or primarily, a colonial legacy. From the first collapse of colonial power in 1941 these institutions had been shaped by Asian initiative. In these tense and violent days of the mid 1950s the seeds of the Southeast Asian miracle were sown by Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, Malay educationalists and returning Japanese businessmen. Now the new promise has spread to India and Vietnam while China reaps the rewards of its state-directed capitalism. Moreover, the darker underside of the colonial story has rarely been told. The maladministration and graft of the military administration; the wild and unchecked fury of white terror in the first years; the extra-judicial killings of young men and women; the grotesque atrocity exhibitions of the mutilated slain; the violence to family life and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers and labourers during resettlement; the insidious small tyrannies of a vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy; the racism and arrogance of empire – all this must be set in the balance.

Merdeka
was lived by an entire generation. But many people in what had been British Asia felt that it had not been realized wholly; that is in the cry of Tan Malaka for ‘one hundred per cent
Merdeka
’ that was raised in the Solo valley in late 1945 and taken up right across the region. The
Merdeka
that was achieved fell something short of this. The achievements of independence were substantial, but new regimes showed themselves willing to adopt the paternalistic methods of colonial rule, and they were eager to retain its authoritarian instruments. It was not always the case. In his constitutional talks for Singapore in April and May 1956, David Marshall rejected a formula for self-government which still gave the British control over internal security, and the power to suspend the constitution. He had become increasingly nervous at the continuing shadow of powers of detention without trial. He denounced the independence he was offered as a ‘three quarters rotten
Merdeka
’. But for all his clear-sightedness of what was at stake, Marshall paid dearly for not taking what was on offer. Within weeks he was swept out of office. In the longer term it was Lee Kuan Yew – the Fabian-inclined, Cambridge-educated lawyer
–who was prepared to compromise with the British and their security state. It seemed that the democratic niceties of the formal transfer of power were not so important as knowing how to wield it effectively. For Marshall the liberal traditions of Western rule were worth fighting for. His ally in this, the charismatic radical Lim Chin Siong, saw the matter from the perspective of the popular movement for a New Democracy, to which he was heir. ‘The people ask for fundamental democratic rights’, Lim Chin Siong had thundered, in an early speech to the Legislative Council, ‘but what have they got? They have got only the freedom of firecrackers after seven o’clock in the evening. The people ask for bread and they have been given stones instead.’ At the heart of the issue was that so long as these discretionary powers hung over society – in whoever’s hands – Singapore would still be unfree, and
Merdeka
would be unrealized.
⁶⁹

In arguing to keep these authoritarian instruments, in particular powers of detention without trial, Lee Kuan Yew pleaded historical necessity, the continuing threat of communism and communalism. This was to become one of the powerful legacies of the end of empire in British Asia. In the aftermath of its revolutionary hour, and scale of the violence it unleashed, not only was communism all but obliterated, but in the process so too were a panoply of other alternatives. Liberalism never recovered from the shocking blows to civil society during these years of upheaval. The internationalist vision of the radicals evaporated. The post-independence elites saw it as a dangerous thing; it was, in Lee Kuan Yew’s striking phrase, ‘anti-national’. In this new atmosphere many of the great figures of the popular movements faced long periods of imprisonment, exile or exclusion. But the vanquished also were struck out of national narratives, and almost vanished from historical memory itself. For many of them the post-independence years were a long struggle to be heard; in the words of Ahmad Boestamam: ‘to give a true picture of how a path to the summit was cut and who were its pioneers, so that in time to come it will not be “the cow that gives the milk but the bull too that gets the credit”’.
⁷⁰
In Britain, much was also forgotten, not least the many horrors of the post-war campaigns in Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam. In 2005 British veterans of the Emergency were refused permission from the British government to wear their campaign medal
from the Malaysian government, the Pingat Jasa Malaysia, in recognition of their sacrifice in conflicts in which 519 British troops were killed.

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 archive. 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 Singapore, 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
.