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By Root 4541 0

Delhi. Once the British left, India’s fractious politicians set about fighting over the spoils of office. The Punjab’s Sikhs and people in the south who did not speak Hindi, the new national language, vociferously demanded special status within the constitution. Refugees from East and West Pakistan had not been fully absorbed into India’s massive, ramshackle cities. On the frontiers, particularly in the northeast, militant groups such as the Nagas, who had been armed and radicalized by the war, continued to fight the central government in Delhi. India’s ‘most dangerous decades’ were looming.

India’s pre-eminent problem was the continuing fight with Pakistan over the Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that Nehru had insisted in 1947 must belong to India. Both countries diverted vital resources to their armed forces, distorting development almost as much as military priorities had done under the Raj. The diplomatic stand-off led to sporadic armed clashes on the borders and, though it did not erode India’s resolutely civilian political order, the army became more and more visible in the politics of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan came to believe that he could do a better job than quarrelling politicians of bringing India to book over Kashmir and holding his fissiparous country together. Ironically, the legacy of Mahomed Ali Jinnah, that consummate political schemer and master artisan of constitutions and resolutions, was to be decades of military rule in Pakistan. Nowhere were the tensions which undermined the new, uncertain and divided state more evident than in East Pakistan, located at the apex of the former crescent of British Southeast Asia. The Bengali-speaking politicians of East Pakistan chafed under what they saw as the semi-colonial domination of their leaders in the western capital of Islamabad. Refugees continued to surge across the borders in both directions, Hindus to the west, Muslims to the east, creating new pools of privation in the poverty-stricken countryside and declining cities. Even on Pakistan’s and India’s most easterly frontier with Burma, conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim, separatists and centralizers continued to kill hundreds and terrorize remote villages.

Many of the acute problems that faced the new nations could be traced directly to the nature of British rule and the corroding, radicalizing effect of the Second World War. They represented the other face of freedom from the beaming crowds and proud processions on independence days. They were also testament to the continuing role of the great Western powers in Asia and the coming of age of the new leviathans, the USSR and China, which were determined to play their own Great Game for South and Southeast Asia. As Nehru leaned towards the USSR, shunned by the anti-communist USA, so the Soviet leadership flattered his wishes and the Soviet security services began to infiltrate the country. Communist China, for its part, fresh from its great success in bolstering Ho Chih Minh in Vietnam, began to play politics in Burma, Pakistan, and Indonesia, though it was impotent to affect the course of the war to the south in Malaya. The Cold War gave new life to old fantasies of imperial dominance. British anti-communism and American suspicion of India caused them tacitly to support the emerging ‘state of martial rule’ in Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and the ‘softer’ authoritarianism of Malaysia and Singapore.

Britain and the USA retained the largest economic and political stakes in the region. Both countries still counted the new states as important partners in trade. Even though India, Pakistan and Burma had erected high tariff barriers against foreign goods, the whole organization of the world economy continued to put them at a massive disadvantage which would persist until the early twenty-first century. Writing from Changi jail in 1959, James Puthucheary, once again a detainee, penned a classic analysis: Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy. It argued that the British still dominated ‘commanding heights and much of the valleys’