Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [45]
Above all, Dorman-Smith’s reappearance brought to the surface the underlying conflicts between the British and the nationalists in Burma. The British had refused to set a date for Burmese independence. In their minds – and the Burmese knew this – independence was not really to be full independence anyway. Burma would still be under the crown, a symbolic issue of great importance for both sides. Worse, the great Anglo-Indian trade nexus was set to engulf the country again. British firms were already pressing the administration to recommence their Burmese operations and Rangoon’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and evacuees in India were demanding the return of their lands and installations. The economic exploitation of Burma by foreign interests was an article of faith even for moderate Burmese politicians. They had in their minds wildly inflated estimates of the real wealth that British companies had sucked out of the country during the Depression years and after. Communists and socialists alike were convinced that ‘British imperialism’ and Indian capital were hovering in the wings waiting to pounce. Some of the British understood this. They had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that the British connection would have to take on a different complexion from now on. ‘We Burmans today are not the Burmans of 1942,’ Aung San warned them.26
In August 1944 Mountbatten himself had said that he favoured some kind of policy statement that the returning British would safeguard Burma from outside exploitation, ‘and particularly from Indian moneylenders’. He acknowledged that under the Japanese ‘a great burden of debt must have been lifted from the shoulders of the Burmese cultivator and I should be very sorry to think that its reimposition would synchronise with our return.’27 An old Burma hand, R. M. MacDougall, had also advised Dorman-Smith that however illusory the Japanese-sponsored ‘ten anna’ independence of 1943 had been, it ‘powerfully affected the imagination of the Burmese’.28 Ba Maw’s tenure as president or ‘Adipadi’ of Burma from 1943 to 1945 had had its Gilbert and Sullivan moments, notably some fanciful official dress and obscure titles, but ultimately the Japanese had pulled the strings. Even so, MacDougall believed it had been ‘an honest attempt’ to restore normal life to the country. Dorman-Smith, however, had retained close connections with both the Indian and the British business communities in Simla. In spite of MacDougall’s warning, he seems to have felt that only foreign private capital could revitalize the Burmese economy. His return to Rangoon on 18 October to take up the civil administration heralded the reappearance of impatient British and Indian firms in the Burmese market.
Aung San had already turned politician by the time Dorman-Smith returned. His political creed, however, was ambiguous. In 1941, when he was being trained by the Japanese, he had written ‘Blueprint for Burma’. This pamphlet spoke of the supremacy of the state and adopted the eugenicist’s language of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples: all the trappings of quasi-fascism, in fact. But it was probably designed for circulation within the Japanese Army and it may well have been Aung San’s enemies who published it for a wider audience in 1946.29 Judging by his speeches and writings after the war, he was a kind of populist democrat, a non-doctrinaire socialist, who believed in ‘one man one vote’, but only insofar as it delivered a government in the people’s interest. This proviso, of course, left room for political intervention by strongmen. Later military dictators exploited this aspect of Aung San’s legacy though, on the whole, Aung San seems to have had a higher regard for democratic values than many contemporary political leaders in Southeast Asia. He must have realized that, as the senior Burmese commander within the newly constituted British Burmese Army, he would have little room for manoeuvre. As head