• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4611 0

king Bodhayappa had been trying to create a Buddhist empire in Southeast Asia. The raid into the northeast of the Indian subcontinent had attracted the attention of a much bigger and well-armed commercial empire, that of the East India Company. From the 1820s onward, Burma had been subject to successive waves of invasion by British troops, colonial logging companies, ruby and oil interests and, finally, Indian merchants and labourers. In 1944 and 1945 the British Indian Army had invaded the country and as late as October 1947 there had still been thousands of Indian soldiers there. That influence had now been withdrawn. Indian troops had left Burma along with the last British officers and civil servants. Up to 800,000 Indian civilians remained in the country, some like Balwant Singh in positions of authority. But India’s proxy empire in Burma disappeared with the end of British rule in the subcontinent. India’s new rulers were to keep a weather eye on events in their neighbouring country and even, on occasions, to intervene with money and military aid. Yet Nehru and his foreign-affairs expert Krishna Menon had no desire for a greater Indian empire. They discouraged both the Indian businessmen and labour unions which wanted to keep a hold on their smaller eastern neighbour. Pakistan retained an interest in the Muslim population of Arakan, but was keen to avoid any further ethnic and religious conflicts that might compromise its bizarre set of borders. The huge land mass of the Indian subcontinent continued to exert its gravitational pull on Burma, like a monster planet influencing a satellite moon, but empire had given way to moral and economic suasion.

In part, this was because the great subcontinent was absorbed in its own problems and because residual British influence was deployed to keep the new dominions from each other’s throats. Mountbatten, the last British leader to span both India and Burma, was preoccupied with the problems that arose from partition. Some of the British who ‘stayed on’ accused him of ‘too much pomp, overacting and creating a “Hollywood atmosphere”’.86 But Indians enjoyed seeing newsreels where he and his wife Edwina were shown deep in discussion with Gandhi or at the recently assassinated leader’s funeral. Later in the year an unofficial war broke out between India and Pakistan over Nehru’s beloved state of Kashmir. The Indian Army was deployed in the mountainous country along long lines of communication to combat invasion by Muslim irregulars, who were determined to bring the Muslim-majority state into Pakistan. The remaining British soldiers and military attachés on both sides tried to prevent the situation from degenerating into full-scale war between two members of the Commonwealth.87 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers who had been comrades in arms in the Burma campaign a mere four years before found themselves on opposite sides. Some old comrades were killed by their erstwhile friends. Major K. K. Tewari, who had fought through the third Arakan campaign and taken part in the reoccupation of Malaya, lost one of his closest comrades in the fighting.88 This man’s mutilated body could be identified only by the Japanese pistol he had in his holster and the copy of the Bhagavad Gita, part of the ancient Hindus scriptures, he kept in his pocket. Roy Bucher, who remained commander-in-chief of the Indian army until 1949, was put in the invidious position of treating his opposite number in Pakistan, Douglas Gracey, as an undeclared enemy. That autumn the Indian Army was also used to occupy and absorb into India the recalcitrant princely state of Hyderabad, whose royal line was Muslim. The ostensible enemy were bands of Muslim irregulars called Razakars, who opposed union with India. But a wider shadow was now falling across the whole of South and Southeast Asia. Bucher and his boss, Vallabhbhai Patel, noted the creeping advance of communism in Asia. They viewed with alarm the beginning of communist ‘base areas’ in the Andhra areas of Madras and nearby southeast Hyderabad. Bucher wrote that the ‘greater