Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [160]
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 between 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