Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [130]
On 1 March a gathering of some 200 Malays took place at the Sultan Suleiman Club in Kampong Bahru, Kuala Lumpur. They were representatives of some forty-one Malay associations, including the MNP and API. The meeting concluded that the interest of the Malays could be defended effectively only by a national umbrella organization of Malay bodies. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO) was founded, and it would dominate Malay politics for the next sixty years. It had no institutional structure, no membership, no broad political platform, but there were few voices of opposition to Onn as its leader. Under his direction, UMNO began to distance itself from the anti-feudal radicalism of the MNP. It was, quite deliberately, an ‘organization’ and not a ‘party’. Dato Onn had even wanted to drop the word ‘national’ and call it UMO, presumably to evoke UNO, the United Nations Organization. Onn, in what one British observer called his ‘perfect, even donnish English’, pronounced it ‘Amno’, which was some way from the vernacular.64
In the name of UMNO, a boycott was announced of the installation of the new governor of the Malayan Union. Sir Edward Gent arrived in Kuala Lumpur on the afternoon of 31 March. He had been a career civil servant in the Colonial Office, where, although a specialist in Far Eastern affairs, he had worked entirely within Whitehall. The appointment was a surprise even to Gent himself. In London he had been a leading advocate of the new policy. As he took residence in King’s House, the rulers gathered for the installation ceremony in their full princely regalia in the Station Hotel, a many-turreted Moorish fantasy of a building. A crowd gathered outside, shouting loyal slogans. But they were, as instructed by the Malay Congress, wearing white bands over their songkoks – the black velvet fez-like caps worn by the Malays for prayer – as a symbol of mourning. Onn bin Jaafar persuaded the rulers to go onto a balcony to acknowledge the crowd. This was an entirely unprecedented gesture: by identifying themselves publicly with the people in this way, the rulers seemed to endorse a subtle shift in the Malay body politic. The Sultan of Kedah was in tears. Onn was worried that violence might erupt, and the rulers saw that they must throw in their lot with UMNO. The meeting ended in patriotic fervour with expressions of allegiance to the sultans. In Onn’s words: ‘The Rulers have become the People and the People have become the Ruler.’ In one sense, this meant that peace had been restored between them; in another, it acknowledged that the rulers now held their position only in so far as they held it in trust for the people. In the words of the Sultan of Pahang, the man who would have headed the independent Malay nation in August 1945 had it been declared: ‘I am one of the people and, therefore, for the people.’65
The rulers asked to see Gent. With much self-effacement at the breach of the protocol, the Sultan of Perak asked that the Union constitution be set aside pending full consultations in Malaya. They adjourned, only to return again shortly before midnight to announce that they would not be attending the swearing in of Gent the next morning, nor even an informal meeting the following day. Although attended by Mountbatten and other worthies, the inauguration of the Malayan Union was, in the words of the News Review, ‘as flat as the local beer’.66 A few days later the rulers announced their repudiation of the MacMichael agreements and their intention to travel en masse to London to demand that their rights be protected in a looser federal constitution. From Park Lane, Sultan Ibrahim asked to see his fellow-monarch, George VI, ostensibly on a social call. The rulers found allies in the creators of