by Harper, Tim
Though he sympathized with the spirit of such ranting, Rance was shrewd enough to see through U Saw. The AFPFL organization was much stronger than Saw’s and Saw was unlikely to be able to exploit any splits within it. Saw’s party, which was associated with pre-war sleaze, would certainly do poorly in an election. Rance quickly decided to back Aung San, recommend concessions to London and try to get the AFPFL to enter the Burmese cabinet. The alternative was a popular revolt, further damage to an already shattered economy and possibly even mass starvation.49 In the meantime, one event pregnant with the future took place. Returning from a visit to his party’s newspaper office, Saw was ambushed by gunmen dressed as AFPFL volunteers about half a mile from Government House on Prome Road. He narrowly escaped assassination and was badly cut around the eyes with broken glass. Next day in the bazaar, most fingers pointed to members of Aung San’s party who must have known about Saw’s parleys with the governor. But this was a gangsterish and prurient sort of Burma. Another strand of gossip indicted U Saw’s Burmese wife, ‘who was anxious to get rid of him on account of his so-called German wife from Uganda’.50 Saw kept his counsel, bided his time and began to stockpile weapons. The consequences for Burma’s future were to be no less critical than the telegrams flying between Rance and Attlee’s government.
Rance’s decision to work with Aung San to counter the gathering social crisis was easier said than done. The young nationalist leader had been languishing ill in bed for some time while the general strike gathered pace: ‘Here I am helpless in bed, and I must remain quiet, God alone knows how long.’51 The bruiser U Saw took this as weakness, but it seems as likely that Aung San was ‘doing a Gandhi’, using his apparent weakness to set the agenda. At any rate, Rance obligingly called on him at his home to discuss the political situation in secret. Rance painted a bleak scenario, not unlike the ones troubling Wavell and Gent: prolonged strikes would lead to communal and anti-British riots and the destruction of the economy. The peasant, already overburdened, would be the great loser.52 There were some favourable signs. Bogyoke had come to the parting of the ways with the communists over the strike. He had clearly decided that large-scale civil disobedience leading potentially to armed rebellion would not only undermine his own position but severely damage what remained of Burma’s economic base. This presaged the expulsion of the communists from the AFPFL on 2 November.53 The impending breach materially strengthened Aung San’s position in Rangoon and Mandalay, though it pointed to trouble in the delta districts where communist sympathizers were numerous. But Aung San needed more concessions from the British to see off the communist threat and damp down civil disruption. Comparisons with India remained irksome. Whatever its larger failures, the Cabinet Mission had at least established that India was heading for independence within two years. In contrast, Burma was still stuck with Churchill’s timescale, set out in the May 1945 White Paper, which put off independence indefinitely. Worse, the 1935 constitution, with its pitifully small franchise and bias towards Indians and Europeans, remained in force. The patience of the AFPFL could not be guaranteed to last for more than a few weeks and this would impede any attempts to call off the strikes. They could not afford to be always in danger of being outflanked on the left by communists who claimed that they had capitulated to imperialism. Rance realized that some type of dramatic gesture had to be made and it would have to be Attlee who made it.
In a sense, the British government in London made the key concession as early as 18 September when it authorized Rance to negotiate on government servants’ wages, to appoint a further Burmese to the governor’s council with the defence portfolio and to arrange a general election for the spring of 1947.54 The White Paper of 1945 was thus quietly shelved. But by now, having waited for so long, Burmese public opinion demanded a far more dramatic gesture. At least Rance could now make a few gestures himself. An offer of increased wages was conveyed to key groups of workers. The governor agreed to include additional AFPFL representatives and members of U Saw’s and even Ba Maw’s parties in his executive council. The changes tipped the balance in favour of Aung San’s supporters. Rance later judged that the AFPFL socialists had been in effective control of the government machine since October 1946.
His authority strengthened, Aung San moved to limit the industrial and political unrest. Strikes in the public sector gradually petered out. The government simultaneously moved against the continuing strikes in private companies. These were targeting the Burmah Oil Company, road transporters and saw mills. The authorities brought in military drivers and Japanese POWs to break the strikes.55 Then the AFPFL began to exert pressure on its own affiliated unions. On 26 October ‘workers demonstrated around the secretariat shouting slogans in support of the Government’. With Rance’s help, Aung San had scored a significant if only temporary victory over the communists. The governor and his officials also began to bargain with the authorities in neighbouring countries to improve Burma’s import position. They approached India about iron and steel supplies, Thailand about oil and, ironically, the American occupation authorities in Japan about supplies of cloth.56 In one sense, Aung San already had the initiative. At the height of the trouble, on 8 October, Nehru sent a telegram to him saying that the interim Indian government was anxious to bring Indian troops home from Burma. But he was keen that the withdrawal should not ‘upset conditions in Burma and be embarrassing to your government’. He also invited Aung San to Delhi in April 1947 to discuss military and other matters of common interest. Wavell was in no doubt about the telegram’s significance. ‘This was sent without consulting me’, he noted.57 Britain’s erstwhile subjects in Asia were now making their political dispositions without consulting British authority. A convention established in about 1800 by Richard Wellesley, Governor General of India, was thus quietly torn up a century and a half later.
Aung San then went on to try to dissolve what remained of British control over Burma’s internal affairs. On 11 November, heavily tutored by the former ICSofficer U Tin Tut, he made what was, in effect, his final set of demands. He denounced the governor’s remaining discretionary power over certain ‘imperial’ subjects as incompatible with democracy.58 The frontier areas would now have to be brought within the remit of a Burmese cabinet. So, too, would control over affairs concerning British and Indian imports. All expenditure would have to be made subject to a vote of the lower house. The British could no longer hope to ‘reserve’ subjects that bore on their own interests, as they had been doing for years. As for the future shape of a popular assembly in Burma, the AFPFL made it perfectly clear that the franchise would have to be universal in the general election that was scheduled for March 1947. There was no going back to the 1935 Government of India Act and its constitution for Burma. All the old subterfuges that had guaranteed the continuation of colonial interests and their hangers-on would have to go. No longer would the Burmese be outvoted by a combination of representatives of the European and Indian chambers of commerce; those great Indian moneylenders, the Nattukottai Chettiyars; and a plethora of Shans, Karens, Kachins, and so on.59
In all this Tin Tut, ‘highly trained, intelligent and very ambitious’, made it clear that his lodestar was India.60 Burmese would never again play poor relations to the Indians. The Indians were now sending ambassadors to other countries, and in a world where nations measured each other according to international clout, that was independence. Tin Tut, who offered constitutional and financial advice to all the Burmese political parties, threatened boycotts and strikes if an agreement on independence was not reached before 31 January 1947. Rance, however, knew that boycotts and strikes would almost certainly be the precursors of armed insurrection. Aung San had only just managed to stave off that threat in October and the social situation in the country was still deteriorating. 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.61 In the interim, these troops could not be used to put down openly nationalist risi
ngs. Timetables were now quite irrelevant. ‘It cannot be argued’, he wrote to the Labour government, that ‘a people by assumption fit to govern themselves in 1948–49, are still unfit to begin the process in 1947–48’.62 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.63 In addition, the Burmese leaders should be rapidly invited to London to discuss outstanding issues, above all financial matters and the future position of the minorities.
Rance’s position was now unequivocal. The policies of Dorman-Smith were thrust aside. As 1946 drew to an end, Attlee and his colleagues realized that further equivocation was impossible in Burma, just at the moment the Indian situation was about to spin out of their control. They had to decide on quick independence for both countries and the form it would take. The AFPFL leadership was abruptly invited to London after New Year. The goal was to keep Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If possible, new agreements would safeguard British commercial interests in the country. The background to the talks in that cold, depressing London winter was an imminent conflagration in Burma. The general strike and accompanying disturbances had simmered down. Yet only Aung San’s authority now stood between the British and a widespread armed uprising. Aung San himself could not afford to compromise again. As it was, he was angry with both the British and the communists because he had been forced to take strong action against the strikers. He feared that this would stand him in bad stead in any future election. Even some of the moderate AFPFL leaders who had accepted ministerial office agreed with the communists that another strike would paralyse the government and force the British to grant immediate independence. 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 confrères 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 executive committee of the AFPFL voted to expel the communists.64 At a critical meeting of the AFPFL supreme council on 2 November the communists accused Aung San and the moderates of becoming a ‘dominion status AFPFL’. For the British, dominion status, meaning self-government within the Commonwealth and defence treaties with the UK, was a political panacea for the dissolution of empire. Burmese would join Australians and Canadians in royal processions along the Mall in London. To the Burmese, dominion status was already a swear word easily paired with ‘fascism’, as was everything else in the limited lexicon of Burmese nationalism. Thein Pe, the communist who had spent much of the war in India and China, launched into a laboured historical analogy. He compared Aung San with a medieval king of the Burmese city of Pagan who did not know his true friends and was eventually murdered by the national enemy, the Mons. Than Tun, the most outspoken of the communist leaders, eventually announced that the parting of the ways had come. ‘Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathisers, who constituted the country.’65 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. He had formed his own ‘red flag’, supposedly Trotskyite, communist faction that went underground and started committing acts of revolutionary terrorism. Meanwhile, Than Tun and his clique had hit back at Soe with a pamphlet which again accused him of seducing a succession of female party workers and of quoting Engels on free love in his defence. Soe certainly seems to have believed that part of his revolutionary duty was to strike heavy blows against the ‘bourgeois family’. Thein Pe accused him of being ‘an anarchist and opportunist in matters of morality. He had a weakness for women and no qualms about alcohol.’66
All the same, the AFPFL moderates were taking a chance in booting out the communists. Broad agreement with the British government there was, but ways and means were still murky. Throughout November and early December the situation remained tense. The Attlee government was disinclined to give all its bargaining chips away before the London meeting. But for his domestic audience, Aung San had to make it appear that the delegation was only going to London for a kind of lap of honour, with the AFPFL having already won every point. Disagreements surfaced over the exact form of the ‘democratic’ constitution Burma was to receive, Burmese control over the armed forces, the status of the frontier areas and the future of British firms in the country. The issue of whether or not Burma would remain in the Commonwealth hovered in the middle distance. Worryingly, too, representatives of business and the minority peoples were lobbying Attlee’s government independently. The Burmese and their 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.67 Against this background Rance continued to push Pethick-Lawrence and Attlee to invite representatives of the Burmese leadership to London as soon as possible, even though the composition of the delegation remained a matter of doubt.
As the AFPFL leadership considered the constitutional endgame, British intelligence warned that the situation was even worse than it had been in early October. Dacoity was rising to a new peak as the harvest operations drew to a close. The local volunteer groups, the PVOs, now numbered 15,000 units, having swelled since the Tantabin incident of the previous May. They were a handy guerrilla force in themselves and in any outbreak would certainly be joined by a good number of the 100,000 armed police who were on the point of mutiny for better pay and conditions. This was quite apart from the non-Karen elements of the BNA who would rally to their former leader Aung San if he took up arms. The local Indians and the Chinese might stay out of a rebellion, but much of the rural population would rise, especially in the Pegu region. As ever, the example of the 1930 rebellion was brought up by the intelligence chiefs: ‘It took two years to put down the 1930 – 2 rebellion when most of the rebels were badly armed… and the police were co-operating with the army’, a report noted.68 In the Tathon area, communists seemed to have infiltrated the ranks of the local dacoits and were organizing them for major attacks. The Meiktila railway link was believed to be under particular threat. Internal unrest in Burma combined with a dangerous external situation. By now, a full-scale civil war had broken out b
etween the Chinese communists and Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalists. 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 1930s. 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’.69
On 13 December General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, 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.70 The only alternative was the kind of warfare that was happening in French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. Commanders who had seen their men survive a brutal world war were extremely reluctant to throw more lives away in minor police actions designed to hold colonial territories of dubious economic value. Finally, the government decided to do what it had really known it was going to do two months or more before. On 20 December, Attlee made a speech in Parliament in which he at last disavowed the maligned White Paper and acknowledged that the government ‘would hasten forward the time when Burma shall realise her independence’.71