Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [309]
In the midst of this, Britain’s Asian empire survived. But, increasingly, the United States was taking over key strategic responsibilities in parts of Asia which for a century had fallen to the Pax Britannica. Not yet an empire itself, America was now the arbiter of others. American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States’ commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. A major review of Britain’s long-term policy in Southeast Asia for the cabinet in October 1949 continued to see a British role there as indispensable to world peace, but it also acknowledged that ‘no plans will, however, be really successful without American participation’.3 On these terms, the British imperial presence endured in Malaya until 1957, in Singapore for five years after this, and in Hong Kong for another forty years.
But these were insular outposts and no longer a great territorial empire. By 1949 British Asia – the great crescent of land that four years earlier had linked Suez to Sydney in one overarching, cosmopolitan swathe – had collapsed. Its last great proconsul, Louis Mount-batten, had finally left the region. The old Indian Army was dismantled. The new sovereign nations of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (though not Burma) remained in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But this was a fragile, racially divided entity, and many more concrete linkages in the region were severed. The route from India to China, via the Burma Road, was closed, and these two emerging Asian superpowers squared up to each other along the line drawn in the Himalayas by the Victorian soldier Sir Henry McMahon. A world of travel and movement was finally stilled. After the last traumatic crossings in the wake of partition in south Asia and the revolutionary struggles in the southeast and east of the continent, most movements thereafter would be within borders. The ‘George Washington of the Overseas Chinese’, Tan Kah Kee, had returned to China and would die in Beijing in 1961. Never again would the Overseas Chinese act as a unified force. The new Indian republic still looked to play a role in the region, but this too was increasingly shaped by Cold War concerns. In 1950 Nehru again visited Singapore, bringing with him his daughter, Indira. More so than in 1946, the British welcomed his visit; he arrived in the wash of Anglo-Indian naval manoeuvres in the Bay of Bengal, and the British hoped he would voice support for their counter-insurgency. Nehru’s reception by the locals was warm, but it was a faint echo of the triumphant progress of 1946. His speeches signalled the changes: ‘Indians in Malaya’, he announced, ‘should not look to India for any help; neither is India in a position to render any because she has her own problems to solve and her own population to look after.’4 Nehru told a rally in Jalan Besar, where he had spoken in 1946: ‘We have seen plenty of killing and become rather callous but this method of terrorism is degrading to the whole human race and reduced men to the level of beasts.’ ‘In the present day’, he explained, ‘governments have to deal with all kinds of violence and force and inevitably they have to deal with that with force.’5
FREEDOM, SLOWLY AND GENTLY
The British war in Malaya would drag on until 1960 and eventually claim the lives of 6,697