Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [226]
The junior managers of the teak estates, with their carefully sequestered Burmese mistresses, at least lived alongside the people and the elephants. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Corporation, by contrast, was naked in its racial exclusiveness. The vast majority of managers had been British or Anglo-Burman; almost all its local employees were Chittagonian Indians. The IFC had a virtual monopoly of motor transport on Burma’s sacred river, so the Burmese had to travel on its boats, but most could not afford or were otherwise subtly excluded from its cabin-class accommodation. It is not surprising that the IFC was marked down for expropriation so early.
‘Boys’ Day’ was coming to a premature end, however, and Thakin Nu’s leadership was quite quickly forced back into a more suppliant mode towards the British and American governments by a prolonged burst of internal disorder. One group of people who knew exactly what was about to happen were the communist leaders who had broken with the AFPFL in 1946 when Aung San had brokered his deal with Rance.21 These red-flag communists, led by Thakin Soe, had been joined by Than Tun’s ‘white’ communists, who had come to blows with the AFPFL more recently over the Nu–Attlee agreement made in the autumn of 1947, which they saw as a sell-out. Than Tun was a longtime associate of Nu and his rebellion shocked the prime minister. To some degree, the new ‘white’ militancy resulted from the changed international situation. Soviet communism was going on to the offensive and its followers in eastern Europe, India and Southeast Asia followed suit. The Indian Communist Party hosted a major conference in Calcutta in February 1948, which was attended by Than Tun along with delegates from Malay and Indo-China. But Than Tun was also over confident.22 He predicted that the ‘bones’ of the AFPFL politicians would fill to the brim the Bagaya Pit near Rangoon. He was buoyed up by the huge gatherings of peasants that came out to hear the leftist leaders in February and March. Than Tun may have misinterpreted the peasants’ enthusiasm for communism: they were probably just looking for some excitement, now that independence had finally dawned and the colonial policemen had retreated from the country. Another communist leader, Thein Pe, believed that Than Tun had made a fatal doctrinal error. The AFPFL was not simply an imperialist and capitalist front; it had a serious ‘mass’ following.23 Than Tun and the others should have been good Marxist believers and waited for a bourgeois revolution and not allowed a workers’ and peasants’ putsch to go off half-cocked. The British felt that Thein Pe’s moderate communism might be even more insidious than that of the white and red revolutionaries.24
The communist ideologues, led by Than Tun and Hari Narayan Ghosal, the latter an Indian labour organizer,25 had scoured the history of the Russian revolution to come up with an analysis of their present situation. In a long, verbose minute, written in the unmistakable leaden language of international communism, Ghosal set out his justification for an immediate Burmese insurrection which was to take place in March 1948 at the latest.26 He argued in retrospect that Aung San and Thakin Nu were not really leaders of a revolutionary people but representatives of a new ‘Burmese bourgeoisie’ that would cooperate with international imperialism. They would allow British, American and even the hated Indian businessmen to carry on exploiting the Burmese people. They doubted that the new regime would push through nationalization, but if it did they believed that even the limited compensation on offer to the likes of Steel Brothers and the Burmah Oil Company would cripple the young nation for a generation. Worse, it would drive Burma to take loans from capitalist countries and organizations such as the International Monetary