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arrived countermanding the order. India had reasserted its primacy again. On 27 March Mountbatten had written to the government of Burma that, although he no longer had any responsibility for Burma, he was deeply perturbed at the proposal to arrest Aung San. Aung San’s antics might have been disturbing but he had ‘played the game by me’ and, given his youth, he was bound to play a major part in Burmese politics for many years to come.114 Three weeks later, as Dorman-Smith was beginning to hope that Mountbatten’s intervention would be ignored, Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence telegraphed Burma urgently from Delhi, where they were on Cabinet Mission duty. They were trying to resolve the increasingly intractable stand-off between the Congress and Muslim League over the structure of a future government of independent India. The Indian issue thrust Burma to the margins. ‘Solely from the point of view of our mission here, we must repeat to you the great risks we see in the arrest of Aung San at this juncture.’115 It would be a ‘disastrous’ move and would derail the whole Indian constitutional process. To a long private letter to Attlee about the Indian deadlock, Pethick-Lawrence added a postscript on the possible arrest of Aung San: ‘My personal feeling is that if we start probing into what happened during the Japanese occupation, we shall stir up mud which may well give us a lot of trouble.’116

The arrest warrant was duly intercepted between the chief secretary and the CID. Another hour and Aung San would have been behind bars. This would almost certainly have been the signal for a mass Burmese uprising against the British which could well have brought about the sort of bloody denouement that the British faced in Indonesia that very year. In Surabaya, they tried to suppress a well-entrenched nationalist movement. Many British and Gurkha soldiers who had survived the campaign against Rommel and the bloody fighting at Imphal and Kohima died for no good reason. In his memoirs Dorman-Smith was unrepentant. This was a nettle that the British had refused to grasp, he insisted. It discouraged the loyal and encouraged illegality. Ultimately, he implied, it set Burma on the path towards authoritarian government.

This attitude was to prove his undoing. The British position was now too weak. As one official put it, it might have been possible to arrest and shoot Aung San a year earlier, but it was too late now. Quite apart from the demands of the Cabinet Mission, the Indian situation frustrated Dorman-Smith at another level. The Indian Army was no longer available to suppress any popular movement that might have developed in response to the detention of Aung San. The Indian authorities had already made it clear that Indian troops could not now be used to put down Burmese nationalists. Congress would not wear it and the Indian Army would anyway probably have mutinied. Watching bitterly from the fringes, Dorman-Smith noted that a meeting of ‘Dickie, Archie [Wavell] and the Auk [Auchinleck]’ in Delhi had decided that the governor of Burma would have to govern in such a way as to avoid a popular uprising. ‘Struth! Old Archie does not seem to be able to manage his show so as to avoid the use of British troops and Indian troops, while friend Dickie seems to be using troops of all sorts in Malaya.’117 This refusal to deploy the Indian Army in Burma was, as he later put it, ‘a bit of a facer’, an insoluble problem, especially as he felt sure that Indians would be among the first to suffer in any AFPFL uprising.118 But he was not ready to give up yet; he still hoped that he could persuade London to go ahead with the arrest and trial of Aung San.

What were the facts about the murder of the headman? Given the years of mayhem in Burma and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, why did it matter so much? The key point was that the man killed by Aung San was a Muslim of Indian descent, one Abdul Rashid, who had been loyal to the British and opposed the nationalists.119 He was headman of a village near Moulmein on the southern coast where tension between