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in Burma after independence. This was ostensibly to train the Burmese army, but the real reason was that it would tie Burma, however loosely, into the Western anti-communist alliance. In September the international communist propaganda body, the Cominform, met in Poland. Andrei Zhdanov, its secretary, propounded a new militant line, calling for putsches against capitalist and imperialist governments.110 The world was in arms again. As the year drew to an end the brief and imperfect peace after the Second World War was evaporating. In a few short months, the red armies had replaced the Axis armies as the mortal enemies of ‘Western democracy’. The Cold War was about to begin, but in Asia it was to take the form of many small ‘hot’ wars.

On his return from London, Nu entered the Buddhist monastery at Myathabeik Hill for a brief ‘religious recess’, followed by a nine-day pilgrimage. He ‘went to the pagodas around Keilatha Hill… where he practiced asceticism and is reputed to have encountered many yogis and ascetics’.111 This was the region from which the medieval Burmese king, Anawratha, took monks when he founded the great temple city of Pagan. Nu himself went on to found a society for Buddhist meditation, aided by a group of conservative nationalist leaders and businessmen. The pilgrimage was intended to show that his agreement with Attlee was merely a technical diplomatic exercise. The real independence of Burma, Nu’s actions implied, would occur when the country reconnected itself to its glorious past and recognized Buddhist contemplation and self-control as the central discipline of the new state. After his pilgrimage, he emerged into the full glare of communist hostility and anti-Western rhetoric.

Nu’s opponents denounced the British services mission. They also attacked any plan to compensate the British firms that were to be nationalized on the grounds that they had exploited the Burmese people for generations. Than Tun, the communist leader, ‘proud, bitter and jealous’, began to plan for armed insurrection. The success of this revolution would depend on the play of interest and aspiration deep in the Burmese countryside. Here the importance of any ideology was profoundly constrained by poverty and poor education. As British rule drew to its close, not much seemed to have changed since 1886 when foreign invasion ended Burma’s freedom. The peasantry was impoverished. The ‘dacoit Po The’ was ‘ravaging, raping and murdering the inhabitants’ of the district of Thayetmo.112 From Mogaung, Balwant Singh, the district officer of Indian origin, remembered that about this time the new government decided to introduce elections for the post of village headman, previously an official appointment. This was all very well, but the practical difficulties were great. Head-manships were fine things for rich country people who could afford to spend time compiling statistics and going to see the district magistrate in return for local prestige, but most people did not have the time or resources. In many cases, the old headmen were voted back faut de mieux. Elsewhere, fierce factional disputes broke out between local notables. Balwant Singh remembered one case where the only suitable candidate was illiterate. He had to make out that the man was attending writing and reading classes in order to get him certified as eligible.113

Burma immediately after its independence seemed on the point of becoming the first of what are now called ‘failed states’. Even when a kind of central control was re-established after 1952, the country rapidly became a ‘failed democracy’. It never achieved India’s relative stability or the early prosperity of Malaya. It remained almost as poor as East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and the wars, civil disturbances and authoritarian rule that it suffered were even worse. The roots of the ethnic insurgencies that were to shake Burma in the years after independence lay far back in colonial history, when the British gave the minority peoples of the old Burmese Empire special administrative status and a relatively privileged