Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [241]
Here Bucher was anticipating a theme which President Eisenhower would coin into that masterful, if erroneous, concept of the ‘domino theory’ in which communist insurgency would topple one postcolonial country after another in South and Southeast Asia. By 1948 China, Vietnam and Burma seemed seriously threatened by the new political contagion. Even in India, observers espoused a kind of ‘minidomino theory’. Hyderabad might link up with Andhra and even with Kerala in the southwest, where communist parties were making electoral headway. In turn, southern Indian communism might be linked through Bengal with Arakanese and Burmese communism and on into Southeast Asia. Actually, for most of Bengal’s population in 1948, the most pressing issue remained the fate of the refugees. People continued to flood across the new border in both directions, fleeing murder and arson during the great Hindu and Muslim festivals, but now scarified by local militias trying to firm up the lines of Radcliffe’s notional border. Communal warfare remained endemic, yet in both north and south Bengal poor peasants were still agitating for better economic conditions, urged on by communists who claimed that Hindu–Muslim conflict was really a smoke screen behind which capitalists, imperialists and ‘feudal elements’ pursued their wicked ways. In the northeast of India, the leadership of a section of the Naga people, which had declared independence the previous August, remained intransigent, waiting to see how Indian administration would turn out in practice.
Against this background the city of Calcutta hosted a series of massive communist meetings. The aim was to show solidarity with the Soviet Communist Party, whose secretary Andrei Zhdanov had recently declared an international struggle against ‘American neocolonialism’. It was also designed to warn off India’s tough, right-wing home minister, Sardar Patel, who was now locking up communist agitators with as much despatch as the British had once done.90 From 19 to 26 February a South East Asia Youth Conference met in the city. Thirty thousand people marched through Calcutta alongside representatives from Malaya, Vietnam, Burma and China. A Chinese youth carried aloft the bloodstained shirt of a comrade who had died on the battlefield, in protest against ‘reaction’.91 Old conflicts between Bose supporters and hardline communists re-emerged. But the popular mood was heady. It received further fuel when the second congress of the Communist Party of India convened in Calcutta a little later. Than Tun arrived proclaiming the need for Indian and Burmese communists to link and overthrow the ‘sham independence’ with which the imperialists had saddled Burma and, by implication, India.92 Malayan communists rapidly moving towards open insurrection followed the proceedings with rapt attention. It was not surprising that British and American observers looked at these events, put them together with the attempt of the USSR to starve out the city of Berlin, and decided that a worldwide communist conspiracy was afoot.
For most people in India, however, independence was far from a sham. Despite the troubles, there was widespread rejoicing and nowhere more so than in the army. Despite the bloody dawn of independence observers spoke of a ‘spirit of joyous freedom’. The Indian Army in Kashmir, said the Indian attaché to the British high commissioner in Delhi, ‘was as joyous and happy as a daughter-in-law who had managed to shake off her troublesome and nagging mother-in-law and set up her own house’.93 The ‘infamous libel’ that the Indian Army would collapse without British officers had been disproved. Yet some homely British traditions lived on in spite of the prevailing bloodshed. General Kodandera Cariappa, appointed commander-in-chief of the Indian Army after Bucher, gave a lecture on the Kashmir operations to the ‘Delhi snowball knitting party’. He later privately