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By Root 4450 0

out to the rest of the world and it was on the rice revenues that the government now depended for most of its income. Ironically, the Karen rebels who could easily have disrupted rice exports from their forward position at Insein did not do so, probably because they too were dependent on income from rice. In fact, as had been clear after the Japanese invasion of 1942, he who controlled Rangoon controlled Burma. This was perhaps the main reason Nu’s government survived.

Another reason was that some foreign aid became available, but in a form surreptitious enough for the Burmese government to disavow accusations that it was drifting towards the Western alliance. In Rangoon and Mandalay there was still a good deal of suspicion about British aid to the Karens. This was understandable in view of the previous year’s shenanigans and the constant support voiced for the minorities in the British press by former Force 136 officers and other Britons who had served in Burma. Nu was not so worried about losing power to the Karen rebels, whom he saw as less hardline than the communists. The real problem was that a Karen advance against Rangoon might spark a Soviet intervention on the communist side. It was not a far-fetched fear. This was the year in which the USSR attempted to starve out its former allies from Berlin, a blockade that was broken only by high-risk relief sorties flown by Allied pilots. But how could Burma be assisted without handing a propaganda victory to the communists? Both the British and the Indians thought that an initiative by the Commonwealth would be easier for the Burmese government to swallow than one started by either the former colonial master or its huge neighbour.

The Commonwealth leaders duly met in New Delhi, where they drew up a plan and issued a joint declaration stating their willingness to help negotiate a peace treaty in Burma.21 But they had already overplayed their hand. Nu’s government had no option but sharply to reject these overtures.22 The military under General Ne Win, now increasingly influential, would allow no further concessions to the Karens. The ranting about ‘imperialist machinations’ on the Burmese left would have become even louder if Nu had accepted Commonwealth mediation. Nu remained suspicious of the British because of the pro-Karen activities of the rogue British officers the year before. Nehru tried to reassure him that the British government had no more interest in Karen separatism than did the Indians. At a press conference in Delhi he made a careful distinction between ‘the imperialists’, meaning the ex-Force 136 types on the fringes of Dorman-Smith’s and Churchill’s circles, and the British government itself, which, he said, merely wanted stability and the resumption of Burma’s full rice exports to India and Britain. But even as Nehru tried to reassure the Burmese of Britain’s good intentions, the Dutch were in the midst of their ‘police action’ against the nationalist regime in Indonesia; there was good reason to think that ‘imperialism’ was far from dead. At the same time, the international situation seemed to be going the way of the communists. Burma was, as Nu later said in one of his homely metaphors, ‘a tender gourd among the spiky cactuses’. If Nehru had been ready then to head up a bloc of non-aligned South and Southeast Asian nations, Burma might have taken shelter under its umbrella, but Nehru was still wary of antagonizing China, where the communists were carrying all before them.

Any deals, therefore, between the Burmese government and noncommunist powers had to be private ones. Burma’s new foreign minister, E Maung, and General Ne Win went to London and negotiated a shipment of 5,000 rifles from the British government under the aegis of the defence agreement. More significantly, Nu flew to Delhi and persuaded India to furnish a large consignment of small arms, ammunition, and, it was thought, covert military advice.23 Having pleaded lack of military supplies, the Indian government finally scratched together something for the Burmese, though Nehru insisted