by Harper, Tim
The Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar killings had already begun the slow tide of migration across the borders of the new states. Sensing that the partition would strand them in hostile territory, hundreds of thousands more had begun to move in July and August. By 4 August Mookherjee, the Hindu leader, was deprecating ‘the mass evacuation of Hindus from the Pakistan zone’.41 Independence and the disclosure of the Radcliffe award speeded the exchange of populations and the atrocities that accompanied it. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim League, Calcutta remained in India, so thousands of its Muslim population moved eastwards while Hindus began to stream westwards. Quite apart from the fact that many of them already had relatives and patrons in the west, the option of remaining in what Tyson called ‘a rural slum’ which, at one stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, had been made a food deficit area did not appeal to them. The government of East Pakistan almost immediately started to beg for rice from neighbouring Arakan, but this seemed a fragile lifeline as the Burmese province was itself wracked by civil war.42 One of the biggest problems was that the police and subordinate civil servants almost unanimously opted for the dominion where their co-religionists were in a majority because ‘a Muslim who elects to serve in West Bengal tends to be looked on, at the moment, as a traitor to his religion and community’, and vice versa. Poorer people threatened with minority status therefore felt that they would have no patrons who would protect their interests in the apparatus of the state and they too began to migrate. Though there was nothing on the scale of the events in the Punjab, minor communal incidents continued throughout the autumn, climaxing in late October and November as Hindus celebrated Durga Puja, the festival of Bengal’s patron deity, and Muslims began their own more sombre celebration of Mohurrum. At this time tension was especially high in Dacca and Chittagong, the latter the division in which Noakhali and Tippera were situated. In Dacca religious animal sacrifice by Hindus was banned for the first time, at least in public. This was a sensible measure but it made the minority community fear for its future and only speeded the exodus. The new prime ministers of West Bengal and East Pakistan, P. C. Ghosh and Khwaja Nizamuddin, respectively, tried to stem the flow with speeches and tours across both territories. Ghosh pronounced the flight of upper-class Hindus from Pakistan ‘a betrayal of the interests of poorer people’. Speaking in Comila, a district town in East Pakistan, he revealed that Muslims in Calcutta had come to him vowing to end the annual sacrifice of cows, which was deeply offensive to the Hindus, in order to ease the situation: ‘I dissuaded them from doing so’, he recalled, ‘as I did not want the Muslims to live their lives as cowards nor do I want the Hindus in East Bengal to behave as cowards.’43 But politicians had acted too little and too late. Rumours, especially of the abduction and rape of women, proved just as deadly as the sporadic burnings. Neighbours turned to killers. One old villager mused: ‘We were under British rule for 200 years. Will Muslims prove more foreign than the British?’ Arthur Dash served in East Pakistan for several months after partition. He remembered the strange world of Dacca, the new capital choked with refugees, lacking basic commodities, its schools crippled by the loss of their Hindu staff. He grew almost accustomed to the cycle of revenge killings: ‘One day, for instance, you would find on your morning walk on the golf course the body of an old woman stabbed to death, lying near the sixth green. Or you are held up in your car at Nawabganj level crossing at 8am… Just before you arrive 28 Hindu passengers had their throats cut by a gang of Muslims who had passed along the whole length of the train.’44 Even those who tried to stay eventually lost heart and hundreds of thousands of migrants crossed the borders again in 1948, 1950–51 and 1973.
In 1946 the poet Samar Sen wrote, in Bengali:
In Bengal, Bihar, Garmukteshwar,
People go to the graveyard or burning ghat
With limbless corpses on shoulders.
Perhaps death brings amity:
Everyone is equal after death–
Bihar’s Hindu and Noakhali’s Muslim
Noakhali’s Hindu and Bihar’s Muslim.45
TRAGEDY IN RANGOON
Burma too was poised on a knife edge. The alarming events in India weighed on the minds of Burmese politicians who had always felt a sense of inferiority as junior partners to Indians in the British Empire. Given the bull-headedness of much of the Karen leadership and the long history of frontier areas’ autonomy, they feared a series of mini-partitions in their own country. There was even greater mistrust of British intentions than there was among Indian leaders. It was not entirely unjustified. The British were unable to throw off their patronizing attitude to the Burmese. Attlee wrote to Nehru: ‘I like Aung San and his colleagues very much, but of course they don’t have the same resources of experienced personnel as you have in India.’46 Attlee had decided the British must leave the country, but he was concerned that the Burmese should stay in the Commonwealth and be firmly tied to Britain by defence and trade agreements. As it turned out, Burma did leave the Commonwealth, but resigned itself to commercial and defence links for some years further. The early bitterly cold weeks of January 1947 in London witnessed the denouement of the long struggle.
It had been mid December 1946 before the AFPFL accepted the invitation to attend talks on Burmese independence in London. The delegation the party sent was supposed to represent all shades of opinion but it was almost inevitably biased towards the AFPFL, now purged of communists, which dominated the governor’s executive council. Aung San was there – the British government insisted on this – but so too was Tin Tut, nominally an independent, as he was the only financial expert in Burmese politics. U Saw also went, along with representatives of other small nationalist parties. Many on both the right and left of Burma’s politics expected the talks to fail and the country to be plunged into full-scale civil disobedience or armed revolt in the new year of 1947. 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.’47 This underestimated Aung San’s growing political sophistication. Passing through Karachi, he had arranged to meet Jinnah. Whatever deal the Muslim League leader managed to wring from independence, a large Muslim majority population would abut the northern frontier of Burma in Arakan. But when he arrived at Karachi airport, Aung San was faced with a diplomatic dilemma. Members of the Congress had arrived in a separate car from the Muslim League leaders and they both tried to whisk him off to their respective accommodations. In a Solomonic gesture, Aung San put his staff in the Congress car with half his luggage and went himself in the League car to find a neutral hotel in which to stay.48 Aung San’s speeches during his stay in India also reflected a dawning consciousness of the outside world. He 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.49 European imperialism was far from dead and this informed Aung San’s demeanour at the London meetings. It was not that the Indians and Burmese saw eye to eye on everything. 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 favour of independence.’50 This might easily have soured relations but for the fact that Nehru took an almost equally jaundiced view of Indian business interests and ignored the widespread clamour from those who wanted untrammelled entry to Burma again.
Before Aung San left for London, Nehru perfo
rmed one final service for his Burmese friend. Despite his growing knowledge of the world, Aung San was unable to dress the part. The only clothes he had brought with him were a longyi and an old and dirty military uniform. Nehru had a new uniform properly tailored for him and it was in this that he appeared in London’s January cold. Not all India’s leaders were as indulgent to Aung San’s bucolic ways. In Delhi the Burmese delegation also met Krishna Menon, Nehru’s special foreign relations adviser and effectively now India’s foreign minister, a suave left-wing negotiator with long years of political experience in Britain. The uneasy relationship of tutelage and resentment between Burmese and Indian nationalism was played out at a personal level. Kyaw Nyein, another delegate, remembered that Aung San met Krishna Menon again when they were both in London. The youthful Aung San, ‘lazy as ever’, had received the austere Indian intellectual stretched out on his hotel bed. Menon asked Kyaw Nyein in confidence whether Aung San could possibly be as influential as he was made out to be. He evidently felt he had been snubbed by meeting the Bogyoke prostrate in a bedroom. Kyaw Nyein mused: ‘Aung San never thought about it; but he wouldn’t think of meeting an Englishman in that way.’51
The cabinet papers record only the dry bones of the discussions.52 But Kyaw Nyein kept a private record of the proceedings. He confirmed that Attlee and, to a lesser extent, Cripps were responsible for the sea change that had overtaken British attitudes the previous autumn. Apparently Pethick-Lawrence and William Hare, Lord Lis-towel, who was now in charge of Burma affairs, had been obsessed with events surrounding the Cabinet Mission to India and its consequences. Even Cripps was focused on Wavell’s problems. Attlee, however, had carefully read the despatches and had come to the conclusion that no one was really in charge in Burma and that armed rebellion was only weeks away. Effectively he had taken over as secretary of state for Burma from the relatively inexperienced Listowel. During the actual meetings, however, Attlee just sat and listened, doodling on his notepad.53 Cripps, as was his wont, did all the talking and Listowel begged off the meetings altogether in order to attend to grander Indian affairs. On the Burmese side it was Tin Tut, naturally, who did the real negotiating. Tin Tut had known Cripps since 1941, when the latter had stayed with him in Rangoon while on his way to meet Chiang Kai Shek in Chungking.
The critical point in the negotiations, according to Kyaw Nyein, was not so much British commercial interests in Burma as the status of the hill areas. At one point Cripps glanced up at the map. He said that if you looked at the hill peoples, Burma seemed to be surrounded by a scythe.54 It was no use getting independence unless these territories and peoples were firmly welded to the new state. With these few words Cripps conceded to Buddhist Burma what 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. Ministers had already tacitly agreed that whatever clever jigsaw work might be done, nothing like a Karen state was really viable. A weak and fissiparous Burma would be dangerously exposed to Chinese incursions from the north and even to communal instability in neighbouring India. The incorporation of the hill areas and minorities would be a tricky problem, however. Both sides agreed that there should be a conference with their leaders at the hill town of Panglong once the delegation returned to Burma. The question of British participation in this remained unresolved. 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.
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.55 Nationalization was to remain a contentious issue between the British and the Burmese for several years.
The London negotiations were a last-ditch effort and their success hung by a thread. The AFPFL was raring to go over to full non-cooperation, a general strike or even civil rebellion. Aung San had set a date of 31 January for nationwide strikes if the AFPFL had not by then been accepted as a national government. The communists, for their part, would immediately try to turn a wave of strikes into a rebellion. As British ministers contemplated acquiescence in Aung San’s demands, a string of more and more alarming intelligence reports warned them of imminent trouble.56 A British military appreciation reported widespread labour unrest and the dislocation of the administration ‘affecting police and Burman elements of the services which must lead to armed conflict with which we are incapable of coping’. The Burmans were still more or less favourably disposed to the British population in Burma: ‘There is just time to retain their friendship if we give up gracefully now – repeat, now.’57 Local communist insurgency picked up ominously early in the New Year. On 16 January AFPFL, militia groups and communist supporters drove around Rangoon in lorries telling the British to ‘get out’. They even did a victory lap through Burma Army headquarters. Rumours circulated that Chinese communists were dropping arms to the local reds. On 21 January, red-flag communists attacked the secretariat, hoping for a replay of events in Saigon. They were repelled by British and Burmese soldiers using fists and rifle butts.58
The Shan and Kachin frontier areas and the Karens of the plains were equally restive. British officers remained a problem here. Noel Stevenson, long-time advocate of the minorities, privately spoke of the British government’s ‘betrayal’ of them. He seems to have been urging the Karen Democratic Union to adopt a tougher stand. So troublesome did he become that Rance wrote to Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, the civil service expert on Burma, that he was ‘very disturbed at Stevenson’s tactics during the past few weeks. Some of his telegrams to the Frontier Areas Administration are on the verge of disloyalty.’ He was ‘almost a fanatic where the frontier areas are concerned’.59 Stevenson had apparently disparaged a Buddhist monk and a Burman district commissioner in the course of talks about the future of the frontier areas, rekindling the old AFPFL suspicion of British divide-and-rule tactics. 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.60
Then, 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 1948.61 New elections would be held. Arrangements for the frontier areas, the minorities and the future of British business in Burma were settled to the satisfaction of both sides. The British still hoped secretly that the AFPFL could be persuaded to stay in the Commonwealth but the issue was shelved in order to maintain the optimistic atmosphere. Aung San knew better. The night before he returned to Burma he had met Tom Driberg one last time. Driberg thought him depressed and full of foreboding, despite his public face of rejoicing. It would be best for Burma to stay in the Commonwealth, Aung San said, but he could not persuade his people.62 A few days later at a press conference in Rangoon, Aung San announced that full elections would be held in the near future leading to the creation of an interim government. It would have the powers of a dominion government such as in Australia or Canada. He made sure to mention that the situation was exactly the same as it was in India, except that Burma did not have a minority problem like that of the Indian Muslims.63 This mus
t have given him great satisfaction, even if it was tinged with apprehension.
Aung San’s first steps as a virtually independent political leader were remarkably sure, despite the massive problems the country faced. It is this, as much as his military exploits, which has kept his reputation high after his death. In the first place the leftist elements still within the AFPFL were less than enthusiastic about the London agreement and the communists were implacably opposed to it. Kyaw Nyein remembered acrimonious arguments in which communists asked each other: ‘Why must you be afraid of Aung San? [Our] party has authority and leadership in the countryside and must assert its power over Aung San… We want a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and not Parliamentary Socialism.’64