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By Root 4451 0

and he was generally much more conciliatory on these issues than were the languishing parties of the right. He seems to have understood instinctively that serious civil strife was only months away unless he worked hard to keep the minorities on board. Apart from his great personal prestige, Aung San was a critical element in these negotiations because he had old links with the minorities, the Karens in particular. Not all Karens had identified with the British cause and some of their leaders in the Irrawaddy delta had come to meet Aung San in 1943 in the hope of reaching an accommodation and putting behind them the massacres of 1942. A Karen unit had fought in the old Burma Defence Army and further negotiations had taken place in 1945 at the time of its revolt against the Japanese. Shortly before his trip to London Aung San had visited the pretty Karen Christian village of Kappali, where the Bishop of Rangoon had once lived, and soon after his return he visited the Shan states.65 Indeed, Aung San was more prepared than most Burmese leaders to accept the cultural and political differences upon which the minorities insisted. He was not a particularly fervent Buddhist and he seems to have been genuinely concerned that the hill peoples got a democratic form of government. He was prepared to concede a large degree of autonomy to them, provided figures such as the sawbwas and tribal headmen were removed from the scene. In one of his speeches just after the war, Aung San recalled that a Karen soldier had once told him that the Karens and the Burmese were exactly the same under the skin. The only difference was that the Burmese preferred to play cards during their periods of leave, while the Karens would go off on fishing expeditions.

The Karen lobbyists who had caused a stir in London the previous autumn were firmly of the belief that the British government would help them to form some kind of Karen state before it finally abandoned responsibility for Burma. They were disappointed. Not only had the frontier areas’ administration gradually declined in political clout after the ousting of Dorman-Smith, but the Labour government had also decided that it would make no further special representations on the part of the minorities. They had been badly shaken by the communal rioting and massacres in India the previous year and by the realization that the Punjab remained a tinderbox of Hindu–Muslim tension. Throughout the empire the idea of ‘special representation’ was being quietly abandoned, for the time at least. Even among Karen radicals the future remained unclear. For some time there had been talk of a country called Kawthulay, a kind of Karenistan. Yet even the most geographically challenged Karen enthusiast must have been aware that this entity, if it had ever existed, would have made the future Pakistan look a positively rational political unit. The delta Karen were scattered widely and were in a majority in only one district. Others lived some distance to the south in Tenasserim. Their distant cousins in the hilly Karenni states to the east were few in number and had had relatively little contact with the modern world.

In February Aung San and British officials convened the promised minorities conference at the hill town of Panglong high up in the northern Shan states. Leaders of the minority peoples met the AFPFL high command. One British representative was Arthur Bottomley, a Labour politician who had been part of an earlier parliamentary delegation to India.66 Aung San met him before the conference and made it clear once again how heavily the long shadow of India lay upon these events. Burmese politicians were concerned that, now that a partition of India was a virtual certainty, the British would try something similar in Burma. Bottomley tried to persuade them that the situation on the subcontinent was quite different. The British, he said, did not want partition. It was being forced on them by the intransigence of the Muslim League and the Congress.

Inevitably, Tin Tut was at Panglong, too. As Burma’s only constitutional