Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [275]
If Nehru was ambivalent about Chinese communism at this stage, he was downright hostile to Indian, Malayan and Burmese communists, regarding the Burmese variety in particular as ‘freebooters and terrorists’.13 The background for this attitude was the situation in India itself. Communist insurrectionists did not have much of a track record in India. There had been agitation in north Bengal in the 1930s, but the Communist Party of India had lost ground when, under orders from Moscow, it had backed the British war effort. But Soviet bosses alone were not to blame for Indian communism’s failings. Indian communists excelled at ranting in coffee shops, but did not seem to be the stuff of the vanguard of the proletariat. Their leadership rallied mass support only in exceptionally propitious circumstances, such as the old state of Hyderabad, especially its alienated Telugu-speaking tract of Telengana. Here the Nizam of Hyderabad’s regime seemed to offer a textbook illustration of Marxist ‘feudal despotism’. Young revolutionaries had seized on peasant grievances and begun to organize rural soviets and people’s courts in classic style. When Hyderabad was absorbed into the Indian Union in 1948, the situation actually deteriorated. So-called razakars, bands of toughs who had been recruited by the Nizam as a kind of ‘Black and Tan’ force to put down the communist rebellion, joined in a mêlée of looting and assassination of landlords. The trouble seemed likely to spread into other parts of the Indian Union. Delhi took tough action against the rebels and an Indian press, tamer in many respects than that which had operated under the British, denounced the revolutionaries and bandits.14
Events at home warmed Nehru to Nu’s position on communist insurgency in Burma. The Indian prime minister’s attitudes were also informed by his fears for the more than 800,000 Indians still living under Nu’s government.15 He did not seek a ‘Greater India’ and had at this point deliberately distanced himself from the overseas imperial ambitions of the Raj. But since the Burmese refugee tragedy of 1942 he had worried about Indians overseas, a fear that was reinforced by a spate of vicious riots against Indians in South Africa after the white supremacists of the National Party took power there in 1948. Early in 1949 Nehru gave the go-ahead for the army to evacuate 4,000 Indians from the Karen stronghold of Insein, a mere six miles from Rangoon.16 Next on his list of potential victims were the 30,000 Indians in the rich sugar-growing Ziawadi estate in southern Burma.17 This was an old colony of farmers from Bihar that the British had settled there several generations earlier. They were now prosperous cash-crop growers and moneylenders who attracted the hostility of the local communists. Nehru believed that the rebels had not yet targeted Indians, but he was not confident that would remain the case. Not only would systematic assaults on Burma’s Indians inflame public opinion at home, a new influx of refugees would add to the horrendous problem of housing and feeding the millions who had fled from Pakistan. Nehru pointedly thanked Nu for averting a large-scale migration of the many Sikhs and north Indian settlers who lived around Myitkyina, the airfield town in the north of the country which had been the scene of so many tragic events during the Japanese occupation.18
THE CENTRE BARELY HOLDS
Nehru’s aim was to get the Burmese