money to squander on antics which keep him in the public eye.’124 A key role was played by the secretary of the AMCJA, Gerald de Cruz, the principal liaison with the Malayan Democratic Union, who took the lead in the organization, and the communist leadership. Certainly it was the MCP that provided much of the mass support: 300,000 from the Federations of Trade Unions alone. Yet the MCP leaders would later regret committing so far to a movement whose agenda they could not control.125 From most accounts of its meetings, the PUTERA–AMCJA was a multivalent body, which no one party succeeding in dominating. The vital need for Malay support gave PUTERA a strong hand. This was particularly apparent in the debates on the constitution. Eber had argued from the outset that the only credible way to oppose the federal plan was to propose an alternative. Its founding principles were hammered out at a series of sub-committee meetings, the most critical in July 1947 at the office of the New Democratic Youth League in Foch Avenue, Kuala Lumpur, a building they shared with the Malayan Communist Party. The meeting, held in English, was attended by the leading figures of the movements involved and chaired by Ishak Haji Muhammad. Mustapha Hussain was witness to it. Ishak, he noted, chose careful words: ‘Everyone adopted a passive attitude, a patient disposition, a peaceful mind and a united stance.’ The central proposal by the Malayan Democratic Union was for a common ‘Malayan’ citizenship, but straightaway this ran into difficulty with the PUTERA representatives. The Malay people, they argued, would not accept the word ‘Malayan’; it was a term imposed on them that did not connote the Malays. The Cambridge-educated Malayan Democratic Union leader, Lim Kean Chye, was indignant: ‘We are not dogs to be led by the people. We lead the people.’ This provoked an angry retort from Mustapha Hussain: ‘Do not humiliate the people.’ The Malays, he went on, ‘slept in bus stations and train stations in order to attend this conference. Some did not even have breakfast. They drank coffee out of a pail. But you, sir (looking at John Eber), even though you were given a comfortable rattan chair, you still need a folded towel to serve as a cushion. Who among us truly needs independence, you or us?’126
Yet a way forward was found. The term ‘Malayan’ was translated as Melayu. To UMNO, this connoted race, but to the Malay left – in the writings of its ideologue Dr Burhanuddin, for example – it had quite a different meaning. In recent months Burhanuddin had placed less emphasis on a Greater Indonesia and more on the inclusion of non-Malays in a kebangsaan Melayu, a Melayu nation. This was open to non-Malays, if they were to embrace it wholeheartedly, to sever their links with other nations and demonstrate their love for Malaya by a ‘willingness to change their bangsa to bangsa Melayu.’ The Melayu, as PUTERA understood it, carried within it the intent ‘to live and die as a Malay’. But a further question arose. Islam was a vital component of Malay history and culture. In the vernacular, to masuk Melayu, ‘become Malay’, meant also to become a Muslim. Did this mean that to truly belong the non-Malays had to accept Islam? The PUTERA spokesmen seemed to deny that it did: Melayu was solely a legal and political category, and freedom of religion was guaranteed in the constitution proposals. ‘The content of “Melayu” nationality’, Boestamam insisted when casting the deciding vote on the issue, ‘is just and not oppressive, wide and progressive.’127 The non-Malays, too, saw the need for an exclusive allegiance to Malaya, but saw nationality as grounded in the individual rights of the citizen; a legal category, which, in a multiracial context, had no implications for cultural conformity.128
The crucial, creative ambiguity was left unresolved; it was, in a sense, lost in translation. Yet the People’s Constitution, as drafted largely by John Eber, went further than the British ever did in envisaging an exclusive nationality for Malaya’s people. It dissolved the distinctions between