The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (40 page)

Like many of the others, Aung San, the man who would later lead the country to independence, came from a small-town and a middleclass family background.
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His grandfather was from a prominent gentry family in Upper Burma, with kinsmen in the royal service, including a minister under King Mindon. His father was a lawyer. Slight and unprepossessing, he had a hard-to-explain charisma that drew a loyal following even in his earliest days at university. His all-consuming passion was politics, and he was soon elected to the Executive Commission of the Student Union, then housed in a roomy whitewashed building on the edge of the campus. He said his heroes were Abraham Lincoln and the nineteenth-century Mexican nationalist leader Benito Juárez, and he spent hours memorizing the parliamentary speeches of Edmund Burke. He also became editor of the Student Union’s magazine. In February 1936 he had his first direct conflict with British authorities for refusing to reveal the name of the student who had written an inflammatory article about the university principal entitled “Hellhound at Large.” He was expelled, but this led to a university-wide student strike and the authorities backing down.

Aung San struck many as an oddball, if a strangely attractive one. As
a child he didn’t speak until he was eight, and as a teenager he often spent hours on his own, thinking and not responding at all to those around him. He seemed unconcerned about his appearance or dress, and his room at university was always a mess. For someone later known as a man of action, he also placed a great store on reading. He was a voracious reader.
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Through his reading he was drawn toward the extremist rhetoric of the day. One of his first battles, on the opinion pages of
The World of Books
, was with the up-and-coming political commentator U Thant, and the subject was school uniforms. The older man, then all of twenty-six, argued for fostering in children a sense of individuality, while Aung San wrote that the “standardization of human life” was both “inevitable and desirable” and questioned Thant’s sense of nationalism. With U Nu as an intermediary, they later became friends.
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But Aung San’s views soon carried the day.

The Do Bama (We Burmans) Society, mainly a group of youngsters and a few off-mainstream politicians, was founded in 1935.
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Its members took the ironic style “Thakin,” meaning “lord” or “master” and generally used to address Europeans, in the same way as sahib in Hindi. They were contemptuous of middle-class politicians and middle-class life-styles and had as their creed to “live dangerously” and seek no personal advantage for nationalist ends. Many lived in poverty. One of their big attractions was their rousing and fairly belligerent song, which later became the national anthem. Many read Marxist literature and turned their energy toward organizing groups of mill workers and oil company employees, but this was only partly fruitful, as very few industrial workers were Burmese, most being Indian. Nietzsche was also a popular inspiration. Some, including perhaps the more clever ones, became Communists, and both a Burma Communist Party and Burma Socialist Party were formed in the years before the war. They were noticed, but barely, by the British authorities, the more established political leaders, and the public at large. They were schoolboys playing politics, marching up and down the street, conspiring in smoky tea shops over a tasty Indian snack, and arguing late at night about John Strachey’s
Theory and Practice of Socialism
in someone’s dingy dorm room, all while British officials and their wives were enjoying a long drink at the Pegu Club or watching a cricket match on the verandah of the Gymkhana. Who would have thought, as late as 1941, that in seven years’ time the Thakins would form Burma’s first independent government?

Under the 1935 constitution, Burma had what looked a lot like a real government. This was an add-on to the 1935 India Act. As part of it Burma was separated from India, ending years of acrimonious debate, while being given as much home rule as any Indian province. There was a House of Representatives with 113 seats, including 12 reserved for ethnic Karen constituencies and 11 for business groups, mainly Scottish. There was also a 36-member Senate, designed as a conservative check, limited (through high-income eligibility rules) to well-to-do businessmen, professionals, landowners, and senior government officials. A cabinet headed by a prime minister was responsible to this new parliament. The governor retained authority over the Shan States and other hill areas as well as various emergency powers. This meant the British were still very much at the top, but there was reason to believe that influence and day-to-day decision making were finally shifting from a purely British officialdom to elected Burmese ministers.

One of the newer faces was an up-and-coming barrister named Dr. Ba Maw. The son of one of Thibaw’s courtiers, Ba Maw was rumored to be of part-Armenian ancestry. A vain man who made showing off his good looks a lifelong pursuit, he designed his own clothes. Based on formal Burmese dress, they might be best described as retroconserva-tive with a twist, as might Ba Maw’s politics. He had gone up to Cambridge to read law at St. Catherine’s College but was then unceremoniously sent down after his tutors discovered that he had been secretly studying for the bar in London as well. By now a committed Anglophobe, he made his way to France, where he struggled to master French and then completed, with some difficulty, a doctorate in literature at Bordeaux.

He had become well known in 1930 representing Saya San at his trial for sedition. It was a good opening for an aspiring nationalist politician, and Ba Maw was elected the first prime minister of Burma under the new constitution. His was to be a coalition government with a radical slant. His own party, the Sinyetha, or Poor Man’s Party, had campaigned on a populist ticket. Mimicking the rhetoric of the day, Dr. Ba Maw called for a program of people’s socialism, adapted to Burma’s national needs, attacking capitalists and promising to lower taxes. But his majority was dependent on the support of business and other conservative
groups in the new legislative chamber. There would be a big divide between rhetoric and reality.
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In this first Burmese experiment with democracy, politics was messy and violent. Because ultimate power was in the hands of the British governor and officialdom, the political parties inhabited a strange middle space between responsible government and theater. Over four years there were three coalition ministries, Ba Maw’s being ousted in 1940. It was a sort of mimicry of what politics in an independent country might be like. Burma was still beset by growing economic and social problems. The economy was still in bad shape. Communal tensions flared up into violent riots, including new and bloody Muslim-Buddhist clashes in 1938. Crime rates remained severe. And the country’s leadership, such as it was, was either consumed by jockeying for ministerial posts or single-mindedly focused on a seemingly distant dream of independence. To the extent anyone had a platform for what an independent Burmese government would actually do, it was the left and the Communists in particular that provided most of the answers. These years also saw the rise of private militias. Surprisingly tolerated by the British authorities, these so-called pocket armies of key political leaders (Ba Maw had his own) were modeled on the Brownshirts and other fascist thugs in Central Europe and paraded up and down the streets of Rangoon, in khaki shorts, brandishing batons and intimidating onlookers. In all this, Britain was of course still in charge and still responsible, and more creative British attention might have improved matters. But with events in Europe, the British had other things to worry about.

By 1938 an epidemic of school and university strikes had begun. And there was growing alignment between the younger Thakins and the All Burma Student Union. On 20 December students demanded the release of some imprisoned Thakin activists. The protest turned violent, and in the ensuing fighting, a policeman broke his club over the head of one of the demonstrators, who later died. The students had their first martyr. This led to more unrest, not just in Rangoon but elsewhere. In February 1939 troops at Mandalay opened fire to disperse thousands of students, Buddhist monks, and workers. Fourteen demonstrators were killed. A framework for Burmese politics for many decades was being set.

Writing in a Rangoon paper in 1939, thirty-year-old U Thant criticized the direction things were taking and his country’s political immaturity
turity, accusing his countrymen of being unable to think critically. “Burmese politics have no meaning save to keep Burmese newspapers busy,” he wrote, adding, “We need not despair. Recognition of the causes of a malady are half the cure.”
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But time for a more nuanced debate was running out.

THE APPROACHING WAR

On 1 September 1939, fifty-six Wehrmacht divisions, including six panzer divisions, led by Colonel Generals Feder von Bock and Gerd von Rundstedt, crossed the border into Poland, and the British Empire declared war on Germany. Over the next eleven months much of Western Europe fell to the armies of Adolf Hitler. By June France had surrendered, and Britain was the only country left standing against what was then the strongest military power in the world. In the Battle of Britain that followed, London was bombed day and night, with as many as three thousand civilians killed on a single raid.

For a while Burma remained comfortably far away. Many on the Thakin side leaned to the left and were willing to see fascism as a threat. But others saw opportunity as well. Dr. Ba Maw now came back into the picture as the head of a new Freedom Bloc, which had three demands: (1) Britain’s recognition of Burma’s right to independence, (2) preparations for calling a constituent assembly, and (3) bringing all the special authorities of the governor immediately within the purview of the cabinet. Ba Maw was appointed the
anarshin
(the dictator or literally the “Master of Authority”) of the new group. Aung San was appointed general secretary. Taking advantage of war to gain independence was the only goal.

There were differences of opinion about how to do this. Some like Ba Maw were inclined to seek out a secret alliance with the Japanese. Some were attracted to the idea of a partnership with the Chinese, and this faction included moderates like U Nu; a mission in late 1939 crossed the mountains to Nanking to see what might be possible.

Another politician now entered the picture: U Saw, who maneuvered his way to the prime ministership in 1939. Cunning and opportunistic, with little formal schooling and a virile dose of political ambition, he banned all militias and used London’s 1941 Defence of

Burma Act to put in place severe restrictions on the press. He took over the once-respected
Sun
newspaper and turned it into his party’s mouthpiece, stirring up ethnic divisions. Communists and Thakins and other political rivals were locked up. Ba Maw, U Nu, and dozens of others wound up in the Mandalay jail. U Saw toned down some of his own violent rhetoric, in part to cozy up to the British, but he still demanded home rule. In 1941 he flew to England to make Burma’s case in person to Winston Churchill, only to be politely dismissed; determined to get something somewhere, he then made contact with Japanese agents in Lisbon, was found out by British intelligence, and was promptly arrested. But he would be back, with a special vengeance.

THE THUNDERBOLT

The Japanese had been stealthily gathering political and other intelligence in Burma for a few years, secretly paying for pro-Japanese articles in
The Sun
and
New Burma
newspapers. They had a modest intelligence network in the region, drawing on an expanding Japanese expatriate presence in the region: photographers, pimps and prostitutes, barbers, and chemists. At home, preparations were beginning for what some hoped would be war against the Americans and Europeans in Southeast Asia. Schools taught Burmese, Thai, Malay, and Indian languages, and young men made themselves ready for the coming battle through daily sumo wrestling and martial arts.
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Skirmishes between China and Japan had already turned into all-out fighting; the entire Chinese seaboard was in Tokyo’s hands, but early wins had not translated into quick victory. The Chinese fell back onto the inland city of Chungking, far up the Yangtze, and the British and the Americans were pulled into the conflict, providing support to the besieged Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek. With war in Europe, war in the Pacific seemed increasingly inevitable. For some, the dream of a Japanese Empire across Southeast Asia was closer than ever.