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By Root 4659 0

into the hill and minority areas. The Seagrim Hospital was founded as a memorial to the heroic special operations officer who had led them. Christian priests even gave the Karens a kind of national anthem: ‘You’ve been persecuted and enslaved as well/The white brother liberators, God sent them back!’50 At this stage only a few Karen, Kachin, Shan or Chin radicals were talking about political separation from Burma, but with partition in the air all around – in India, Palestine, Ireland and Poland – expectations had been raised to a dangerously high level. The confused military settlement between Aung San and the British had made matters worse. At the negotiations at Kandy in September 1945 little attempt had been made to merge the armed minorities with the armed Burmese. Instead there was to be a ‘two-wing army’, one wing consisting mainly of Kachins, Karens and Chins officered by British regulars, the other mainly of Burmese elements in the British army and 6,000-odd BNA men. The officer corps of this second wing was to be ‘Burmanized’. This, of course, was a recipe for long-term ethnic conflict, particularly in view of the existence of tens of thousands of other Burmese who were organized into the PVOs and had access to illicit arms.51 Southeast Asia’s bloody conflicts had merely paused for a few months in the afterglow of the atomic bomb.

INDIA: THE KEY

During the two years between the atom bomb and Indian independence, Indian concerns drove British policy in Southeast Asia. The availability or otherwise of the Indian Army to suppress dissidence determined events not just in Burma and Malaya, but even in Indo-China and Indonesia. Public perceptions of the East were shaped above all by events in India, much to the dismay of nationalist leaders in Burma and Malaya who wanted to get their concerns to the top of the agenda. Even after 1947 India cast a long shadow over the region, though the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scrupulously tried to avoid the perception that ‘greater India’ would now replace the British Empire east of Bengal. British policy towards India over these years was formed by a set of assumptions and sensibilities that went far back into the past of the Labour Party and the Indian National Congress. Attlee, Cripps and Nehru had a long and tumultuous history of mutual admiration and mutual distrust. Attlee had served on the Simon Commission of 1927–9, an all-white committee of constitutional enquiry which Indian nationalists believed had hijacked their country’s future and perpetuated British power by a policy of divide and rule. Nehru and Cripps, old socialist thinkers, had parted company with bad grace in 1942 after the failure of the Cripps mission to find a solution to the constitutional tangle.52 Nehru and many other Congressmen had spent most of the rest of the war years in British Indian jails.

This long history was no less apparent in the case of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Labour Party elder statesman and the newly appointed secretary of state for India and Burma in the Labour government. Pethick-Lawrence and his wife had been involved in Indian issues since the 1920s. Burma, by contrast, hardly entered their consciousness. In September 1945, as her husband took up his job, Lady Pethick-Lawrence wrote to Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, about her early days as a suffragette. ‘As long ago as 1909/10 Indian students were in the habit of attending our suffrage meetings in great numbers and I had many personal conversations with them.’53 They had associated the movement for women’s votes with the liberation of India and she now knew ‘how faithfully that promise has been kept’. Even when Pethick-Lawrence had been a member of the 1929 Labour government, his wife had remained a member of the pro-Congress India League.54

The Labour Party of the 1940s was still essentially the political arm of a movement of moral, and specifically Christian, reform. Likewise the Congress was suffused with Gandhi’s neo-Tolstoyan and semi-Christian ideology, while even the socialism espoused by Jawaharlal