Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [203]
of a thousand or so thondar pedai descended on Bedong, only to be confronted by the police. A labourer came forward: ‘We are not anti-government,’ he cried, ‘we are only against the drinking of toddy.’ He was clubbed to the ground and later died in hospital. The coroner recorded a death of ‘justifiable homicide’. A series of protest strikes erupted in the area. At Bukit Sembilan estate on 3 March trouble was triggered by the dismissal of a woman activist, and the police faced orchestrated resistance. ‘Women were to be in the forefront armed with pepper,’ it was reported; ‘Boiling water was to be kept ready; men were to be armed with sticks, stones and bottles full of sand; trees were to be cut down to make road blocks.’ Sixty-six people were arrested, and all but five of them sent to jail after a trial that lasted only a day. Fearing a rescue attempt, the police closed the hearing to the public. An investigation by the Malayan Indian Congress revealed collusion and premeditation on the part of local planters and police. S. K. Chettur claimed that women were beaten, and there were allegations that two young girls were raped in custody. Conditions at Bukit Sembilan estate were particularly dire: the only supply of water came from ravines, and labourers shared it with their cattle; the managers had their water brought from town by lorry. The strikers’ demands focused on wages and family needs, such as crèches, better housing and equal pay for women. But the real source of anger was the summary dismissal of workers: ‘Managers feel that because we reside on the estates we are as much their property as the rubber trees.’38 As the strikes spread across central Kedah, and also to Selangor and Johore, planters were turning dissident labourers out of estates where they had lived for ten to twenty years.39 On Dublin estate in Kedah on 26 April, when 2,000 Indians laid down tools in protest at evictions following a secret union meeting at night in a shed belonging to the temple, 1,000 Chinese came out in sympathy. The police opened fire on demonstrators and one Chinese striker was killed. Even the mouthpiece of European business, the Straits Times, was appalled: ‘we simply cannot have the Police firing on crowds of labourers all over the country’.40 The wives of European planters fled to Penang.
It seemed that Indian and Chinese estate workers were forming a common front. They were the last major body of labourers that lay outside the communist-led Federations of Trade Unions. Its Indian leaders now came forward to help estate workers organize; many of them, including the president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, had both an INA and an MPAJA pedigree. Many Indian trade unions fought to stay independent, and the trade union adviser, John Brazier, sponsored rival unions, some backed by the Malayan Indian Congress, some led by estate clerks. Nevertheless, the Kedah disturbances on the estates were accompanied by a show of strength by the Federation. In Singapore, key municipal services, public transport and the port were paralysed. A strike at Batu Arang mine left power stations down to just three weeks’ supply of coal and the railways running on skeleton services. For the last time, the Japanese were brought in. But they too now worked on a go-slow. The Singapore Federation of Trade Unions mobilized the invisible city to provide strikers with food, cigarettes and strike funds.41 But if their resolve wavered, its underground Workers Protection Corps used secret-society methods to enforce discipline. When the secretary of the municipal workers’ union opened negotiations with the government, he was stabbed. The aim of the strikes, Brazier believed, was to make the communist-backed unions the new ‘labour bosses’ of Singapore. He had all but abandoned his work on the island.42 He concluded that the niceties of English collective bargaining did not translate into a Malayan context. One problem was the penchant of local petition-writers for flowery metaphors: they spoke of ‘“baths of blood” and “seas of fire