Forgotten Wars (62 page)

Shortly before dawn on 4 January 1948 dozens of diplomats prised themselves from their beds and proceeded to don official clothing and regalia. Burma’s independence and exit from the Commonwealth had finally come to pass. Terrified by the memory of the assassination of Aung San, Burma’s youthful leaders had consulted numerous astrologers. They had insisted that the date should be moved from 6 to 4 January and that the proclamation itself should take place at precisely 4 o’clock in the morning to take advantage of a favourable conjunction of the stars. Later that day Thakin Nu gave a speech setting out his high hopes for the new republic. He traced the history of Burma, from its great medieval past through the humiliations of British rule and Japanese invasion. The spirit of Aung San was heavy in the air; he had made ‘the last sacrifice on the altar of freedom’.
¹
True to tradition in the Buddhist world, the new country’s president announced a purge of Burma’s religious establishment to match the prime minister’s political revolution. ‘Evil practices’ such as ‘caste, begging, pagoda and monastery slavery’ would be abolished.
²
The new national flag fluttered incongruously over the neo-Gothic government house in Rangoon, where a few years earlier, as Burma fell to the Japanese, Reginald Dorman-Smith had roamed amid what he saw as the jeering portraits of his predecessors. A significant number of men and women born before 1885 had lived to see their nation free again.

That evening in Delhi Dorman-Smith’s bête noire, Mountbatten, held one of his ceremonious Governor General’s spectacles. He presented to the Burmese ambassador a table that had belonged to the
last independent ruler of Burma, King Thibaw. General Bucher, now commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, was unimpressed by the item, which, he wrote, ‘looked not unlike a very superior wash stand’.
³
He also cringed when the orderly making the presentation, ‘dressed in a costume which resembled that nowadays worn by attendants at Bertram Mills Circus’, became entangled in his spurs. Yet Mountbatten, with his eye for ornamental symbolism, had not failed to mark the final severing of the imperial link between India and Burma.

Out in the Shan hills of eastern Burma, where Balwant Singh, the district magistrate of Indian descent, was now posted, the ceremonies were more prosaic. Balwant Singh felt a thrill of anticipation as the Union Flag was lowered and the Burmese flag went up in that chilly early morning. Yet, he remembered,

somehow our ceremony seemed mundane and the newly liberated citizenry unconcerned. When the district commissioner, U Aung Pe, officially declared that Burma was independent, it seemed a flat statement. The ceremonies continued. As the police marched past, the district commissioner took their salute, looking to me rather odd in his silk
pasoe
, dark jacket and pink headdress. There was something awkward about the way he saluted.
⁴

Later the DC laid a wreath at the local martyrs’ memorial that commemorated the assassinated Aung San and his colleagues. Sports events and cart races followed. Perhaps the low-key mood reflected people’s fears for the future. In this area the communists almost immediately started a movement for the non-payment of taxes, sending small armed bands to terrorize the better-off residents and levy their own punitive wealth taxes. The administration responded by forming village defence groups, a tactic that was to become common down the whole length of the crescent from the Indian border as far as Singapore. To Balwant Singh’s disgust, officials also instituted a policy of burning villages whose inhabitants were suspected of collaboration with the communists and forcibly relocating others away from the influence of the insurgents.
⁵

The Burmese indeed awaited independence with hope and trepidation. At this point, hope prevailed. John Furnivall, the 71-year-old left-wing agrarian expert, was the only former British official invited to return to the country as an adviser. A Fabian socialist and practising
Christian who had briefly toyed with Buddhism, Furnivall had written a number of books that denounced ‘colonial capitalism’ and indicted the British for exacerbating ethnic differences in Southeast Asia.
⁶
In the 1930s Furnivall had got to know Nu and the other nationalist leaders while he helped to run a socialist bookshop in Rangoon. Later he worked with the government in exile at Simla, advising on the reconstruction of Burma, but he was always fiercely critical of Dorman-Smith, whom he accused of promoting the return of British firms to exploit the Burmese.
⁷
Coming back to Burma after nearly a decade, Furnivall was struck by the changes in Rangoon: ‘Rangoon is no longer an Indian city’, he wrote.
⁸
Burmese, not Indians, now predominated among Rangoon dock workers. The Chinese, too, were more or less invisible as they had adopted traditional Burmese dress during the war. But at the same time traditional Burmese costumes were giving way to new fashions for the aspiring new nation. People wore trilby hats and pith helmets, once a symbol of the white rulers, rather than Burmese turbans.
⁹
Many women were to be seen on the streets in battle dress or the dull green longyis of the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVOs).

Furnivall was also struck by the popular celebrations accompanying independence. Shortly after his return he went to a dramatic performance, a
pyazat
: ‘It ended with a scene depicting a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver. That was a dream in which almost everyone indulged.’
¹⁰
In this drama, ‘the peasants and artisans triumphed over capitalism and imperialism’.
¹¹
Many of the monks sweeping the platform of the now glistening and restored Shwedagon pagoda believed equally firmly that a new age of
dharma
, or spiritual virtue, had arrived. State and religion were about to be united again. They knew that this cosmic event was to be celebrated at a ceremony at which Nu, their reluctant prime minister, would distribute great quantities of food and gifts to the serried ranks of saffron-robed monks at the pagoda. Celebrations lit up the streets in Rangoon. In Mandalay, the half burnt-out city was beginning to rise again; ugly concrete blocks sprang up from the ashes of the pretty wooden shophouses. Burmese traders looked forward to inheriting everything left by departed Indian magnates. Burmese peasants rejoiced at the prospect of the cancellation of their loans from the resented Chettiyar moneylenders. Edgy
young soldiers and militiamen, toting their rifles on the streets and taking a cut from passing buses and taxis, confidently expected that the new government would expand the armed forces and raise their pay. Across the country, however, the peoples of the frontier areas, along with Christians, Anglo-Burmans, the few remaining British settlers, Karens, Kachins and Shans, waited tensely to see whether the new regime would honour the concessions made to them by Aung San at the Panglong conference and in other statements. No one was sure whether the millennium or an apocalypse lay ahead.

The new government got to work on 5 January with a huge head of steam behind it. Edgar Snow, an American journalist and veteran of Mao Zedong’s ‘long march’, visited Rangoon a few weeks after independence. Snow had had his first taste of Burmese radicalism when he met Thein Pe in India in 1943 and was persuaded to write a preface to the latter’s
What Happened in Burma
. On his visit to Rangoon Snow stayed with Furnivall.
¹²
It was from Furnivall, the British Foreign Office thought, that Snow had got the rather inflated figures of the pre-war profits of British firms that he used in an article to justify the forthcoming nationalization of British assets. An official in London remarked sourly of Furnivall that his ‘socialist antipathy to British firms in Burma, acquired during his long ICS service, is well known’.
¹³

Snow marvelled at the youth of the new leadership. Nu himself was ‘an old man’ of forty-two; the interior minister was a stripling of thirty-six.
¹⁴
Snow was charmed by the youthful enthusiasm, even naivety of his smiling hosts. It was Boys’ Day all year round, he thought. The government’s two-year plan for the economy was most impressive: Stalinism with a smile. Land would be given back to the tiller, as had been the case before the British invasion. Then collective farming on the Chinese model would gradually be introduced. The government would take over management of rice exports, the profit from which had gone into pockets in London, Bombay and Madras for a generation. The government would nationalize the great companies and pay off their former British and Indian owners with bonds, which meant the money would stay in Burma. Burma would become neutral in foreign affairs and a great start was to be made in March with the All-Asian Peasants Conference to be held in Mandalay. Snow
put down the slightly unorthodox enthusiasm of the young Burmese rulers to the old national habit of mixing astrology, spirit worship and Buddhism. Burmese were ‘competent’ and pragmatic. They picked and mixed from every ideology on display. But even the amiable and left-leaning Snow worried about what the future would really bring to this small, young country wedged between two huge expansionist neighbours and perched atop the outposts of the British Empire, spruced up and given a new lease of life by its American cousin: ‘It’s like power and responsibility being suddenly handed to a student union, to realise the Utopia they have long demanded from their hopeless elders,’ he mused.
¹⁵
Furnivall also shared these misgivings. When he first entered his new office, the Burmese minister of planning pumped the hand of the old ICS man and said: ‘Now we have independence, give us a plan.’ Nu, Furnivall thought, was charming and enthusiastic but ‘perhaps over-prolific of ideas’.
¹⁶

Central to the health of the new republic was indeed the genial figure of Thakin Nu. The new prime minister epitomized the Buddhist socialism that was to be the hallmark of Burma’s independence. Always pining to return to the monastery, Nu was nevertheless no traditional man, but more a kind of intellectual magpie. He had been and continued to be a prolific writer and lecturer. His 1940 novel in Burmese,
Man, the Wolf of Man
, was so called after Thomas Hobbes’s dictum ‘Man is to man a wolf’. In it he had expatiated on the evils of colonial capitalism, asserting that the patient Burmese peasantry must be freed from debt to reach their true potential as spiritual beings. He said he had been influenced by writers as various as Sir Thomas More, G. F. Hegel, H. G. Wells and Sigmund Freud.
¹⁷
His was a modernist Buddhism which opposed the mistaken use of the doctrine of karma – cosmic retribution – which, he thought, encouraged uneducated people to be passive and accepting of exploitation. Instead, Buddhism was a science to perfect the human soul. Later, at an archaeological excavation on the site of an ancient monastery, he alluded to the discovery of penicillin and the invention of jet propulsion and the atom bomb, but pointed to the even more important and equally ‘scientific’ discoveries of the Buddha. At least in these early days, many Burmese saw him as an almost ideal ruler, akin to the legendary sage-king of Burmese folklore, Setkya Min. Popular dramatic performances
propagated this idea. Nu saw no contradiction between Buddhism and socialism either, though, as Furnivall tartly pointed out, this was perhaps because ‘although an enthusiastic Marxist, he knows little and understands less of Marxism’.
¹⁸

Relations with the British began to become a little strained, despite the good will which had been generated by the Anglo-Burmese agreement and Listowel’s visit of the previous autumn. Public opinion wanted swift action to end the legacy of colonial rule, even if Thakin Nu realized the importance of keeping foreign capital flowing into the country. The press was full of denunciations of capitalists and imperialists while more than 100,000 members of the PVOs were straining at the leash across the country.
¹⁹
The big British firms seemed the most appropriate targets. Within weeks of independence the new government served notice that it would immediately nationalize the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company and the mines. It also announced it would take over a third of all the great teak forests of central Burma which accounted for about 40 per cent of Steel Brothers’ holdings.
²⁰
This caused consternation in the City of London and Whitehall because the question of compensation was mentioned in only the vaguest possible terms. The gentlemanly capitalists of the ‘square mile’ were very well aware of how limited the Burmese government’s resources were. Their alarm was, however, tempered with glee. Financiers and some of the more conservative civil servants noted that the anticapitalist British government was finally being forced to recognize the importance of the resources which Britain had secured during the pre-war period of capitalist free trade: ‘HMG is on something of a cleft stick’, one presumably Tory official noted with satisfaction.

This attack on British firms by the Burmese government was more a matter of psychology than of leftist political economy. What was really under attack was not so much the capitalist system, but the greed and discrimination associated with it in the minds of a Buddhist people long attuned to regard themselves as underdogs, the servants of the servants. No doubt there was a drain of wealth from Burma in the pre-war period. Its handsome surplus on exports of teak, wolfram and oil to India and Britain was almost certainly outbalanced by the flow of resources abroad in the form of insurance and transport payments, and the salaries and remittances of British and Indian
workers in the country. Ironically, though, it was what had stayed in the country that had caused most offence to the Burmese. After 1936 British firms operating in Burma had chosen to avoid high taxation by ‘ploughing back’ earnings into local projects. To a large extent, what had resulted were not new commercial enterprises which would help the Burmese but bigger salaries and perks for British expatriates and, to a lesser extent, their Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Indian and Indian employees. In local terms the expatriates’ earnings had been massive. Huge country houses with large staffs of Burmese servants had sprung up on the northern outskirts of Rangoon. Money had been ‘ploughed back’ into rose gardens and tropical fern houses around Maymyo, or charabancs to ferry poetry lovers to picnics at the Hampshire Falls. This had all taken place as racial segregation had become more pronounced. The old days of a nod and a wink and a cheroot had been replaced by the flagrant racism of the British nouveaux riches. To the Burmese of 1948, all these greedy interests, British and Indian, had seemed to be re-infecting the body politic under the guise of ‘rehabilitation’ or the slogan of keeping Burma open to ‘international capital investment’.