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By Root 4467 0

Marx and May Day, a somewhat muted affair after the earlier arrests and banishments, and there were large anti-war rallies in May and June in Singapore and many peninsular towns. The memory of the war remained deeply divisive. On the first anniversary of VJ Day in Singapore, the Chinese Chambers of Commerce and the Kuomintang paraded in the morning as part of the official event. Then the left paraded in the afternoon.116 It was a massive show of strength: a procession a mile long snaked through the city, led by veterans of the forgotten armies, of the Chinese fighters of Dalforce still demanding back pay. Some 130 other associations followed: the New Democratic Youth League, the MPAJA ex-Comrades, the trade unions, the Malayan Democratic Union and many more. A year after the end of the war, the demands were still the same: for rice, clothes and freedom, and an end to crime and violence. The parade was, as the local press pointed out, an act of thanksgiving for the end of Japanese tyranny, but it was not a sign of rejoicing. As the second colonial conquest of Malaya finally began to put down roots there, it was to be tested by a new and potentially fatal wave of opposition. Despite all the setbacks it had faced, by the end of the year the Malayan Communist Party proclaimed that its organization was larger now than during the Malayan Spring: ‘This time there are more participants and there is unanimity in their actions.’117

7

1947: At Freedom’s Gate

THE LAST DAYS OF THE RAJ

Even during the tense early months of 1947 as India, Pakistan and Burma lurched violently towards freedom, the Second World War continued to cast a long shadow. In India the issue of the INA still rankled with the British, even though all now realized that their tenure in the subcontinent was in its final stages. Wavell’s original 7,600 ‘blacks’ – men guilty of particularly treasonable or brutal acts – had been reduced by 5,500 who had been dismissed from the service with forfeiture of pay and allowances. Despite the bad publicity of the 1945 trials, in early 1946 it was still intended to bring 600 ‘blacks’ to trial. This proved hopelessly optimistic. The military lawyers found the case against many of them difficult to prove. Continuous Congress agitation against the trials sapped Wavell’s and Auchinleck’s determination to proceed with them. The number proposed for trial dropped steadily, first to 300, then to fewer than 100. Finally, twenty were brought to trial in the Delhi Red Fort on charges of gross brutality. Of these, twelve were sentenced to long prison terms. In January 1947 Sarat Bose began one final push to get all the men released. He even demanded that they be given pay and allowances for the period that they were serving under the Japanese, a suggestion that particularly infuriated the British.1 Bose tried to pressure Nehru through the Indian defence minister of the interim government, Sardar Baldev Singh. The viceroy and the commander-in-chief were both determined to resist this, even though it became a huge issue in the central legislative assembly.

The Congress leadership prevaricated. They had always been aware of the deep public hostility to the trials, even in those cases purportedly relating to ‘brutality’. This was the reason Nehru and Patel had stood so firmly behind the INA prisoners in 1945. But these two men were now virtually the rulers of India. They did not want an open breach with the viceroy and commander-in-chief because it might have fostered public disturbance in a period of rising tension. Any issue could easily ‘turn communal’. Some conservative Muslim clerics had long since denounced the INA as enemies of Islam because of their support for the ‘godless Japanese’. A breach with the remaining British officers of the Indian Army would also be dangerous, given the pervasive fear that the security situation in the country might easily deteriorate disastrously.

Archibald Wavell had come to the end of his tenure as viceroy and almost to the end of his tether. He had been continuously involved with India and its