As it turned out, everything was much more fragile than the authorities thought. The youth in the villages and in the volunteer organizations were deeply frustrated. The millennium had been promised for three years, it had dawned and nothing much had changed. The towns were doing better, but there were still areas of deep misery in the countryside, hungry for basic commodities let alone consumer goods. Land reform was in train but already it seemed that the people who were getting ‘peasant holdings’ sequestered from the Indian, Chinese and other landholders were the hangers-on of the AFPFL village committees and not young PVO men who had fought for their country.36 Indian moneylenders still collected their interest in the delta villages. Arrogant Europeans still patrolled the teak forests. Communist propaganda was quite effective. The young believed that Britain was still milking Burma of its resources and, worse, that the Burmese government was paying compensation to it for the nationalization of unprincipled British firms. Burma’s military forces were not even its own, as could be seen by the presence of the British services mission.
Quite apart from these local resentments, a deep sense that the world was changing had trickled into even remote areas. Something called communism, which promised to get rid of landowners and capitalists, was sweeping across eastern Europe. Burmese communists joined Indian ones at their great congress in Calcutta in February 1948, perhaps the high point of radical communism in India. The Party had finally began to throw off the taint that it had collaborated with the British during the war. A violent and partly successful communist movement was pitting peasants against landlords in the southern Indian state of Telengana (to the north of the old Madras presidency) and this was shaking Jawaharlal Nehru’s new polity. Burmese communists also met British communists in a conference in London that year. Meanwhile, Andrei Zhdanov and the Cominform were apparently preparing for a set of risings across Southeast Asia which would parallel the successes of communism in eastern Europe. Connections between these different groups of revolutionaries were indeed extremely indirect, but there was a general sense that the socialist world had emerged from the war in a strong position.
Back in Burma, nationalist defeats in China crept closer to the northern border and army deserters flooded into the Kachin and northern Shan states. A new charismatic name began to be heard among the youths arguing in the meeting places of small towns: Mao Zedong. There is little evidence that the Chinese communists had even the most distant relationship with the red- or white-flag communists in Burma before 1948,37 but Burmese translations of Mao’s works began to appear in large numbers in the early months of that year. Mao’s military language and insistence that the peasantry could be the vanguard of revolution appealed to young people whose world had already been turned upside down once in their short lives. It meant much more than the arid, Moscow-style logic chopping of orthodox communists and their Bengali admirers. Even the British embassy began to hear rumours of Mao. They telegraphed to London asking for English translations of his works. Yet no one in London seemed to know who he was.
Hari Narayan Ghosal and his allies must have sensed this change in public mood, so rather than risk being caught off guard by an outbreak of unco-ordinated popular uprisings in the delta and the north, they began in the early weeks of 1948 to plan a co-ordinated uprising for the late spring. Ghosal adhered to what was called a ‘working-class’ strategy. This involved the formation in the towns of armed workers’ militias. Than Tun and Ba Thein, two other leaders, favoured creating ‘base areas’ among the peasantry in what was rapidly becoming known as a Maoist strategy. In this ‘semi-feudal’ country, ignoring the peasantry was not an option. Ghosal himself addressed a mass meeting of hundreds of thousands of peasants in March 1948, promising them land and no taxes.38 The idea was apparently to move in March and April to create a series of communist-controlled base areas which would cut the country in two and isolate Rangoon from Mandalay. Then, as the monsoon set in and the already stretched and immobile government forces became bogged down in the mud, these base areas could be linked together. A working-class rising in the Rangoon docks and the southern oil installations would accompany a coup d’état which would foreshadow victory over imperialism and the Burmese bourgeoisie. As it was, the government, which was partially informed of these plans, made the first move. On 23 March several communist leaders were rounded up by the police and interrogated, but the operation was bungled and many of the most important leaders scattered into the hinterland.39
By 1 April the political situation in the country was very uneasy and a week later the typical signs of a Burmese insurrection were plain to see. Telegraph wires and bridges were sabotaged across the delta and police stations were under attack in a way reminiscent of the revolt against the Japanese three years earlier. Some of those more traditional symptoms of a coming uprising which generations of British officials were taught to expect had also begun to appear. People had their skin tattooed to ward off evil and insurgents tried to make themselves invulnerable to government bullets with spells.40 The old prophecies of the 1880s about Burma’s future were ransacked once again and spirit dancers at the nat spirit shrines mouthed apocalyptic premonitions. Villages were burned and police stations attacked across a wide range of territory in the south and the north-central part of the country. The six-month-long ‘Boys’ Day’ party abruptly broke up in tears. James Bowker, the British ambassador, described ‘a state of mind bordering on panic’ in the Rangoon secretariat.41 To add to its troubles, the government got into a long slugging match with the press about one of Burma’s periodic political sex scandals. The minister of agriculture was accused of seducing a ‘respectable’ married woman. The minister denied this and the AFPFL leadership began attacking newspapers and encouraging mobs to destroy several newspaper offices and presses. It mattered little that the public later discovered that the woman concerned had gone through no fewer than five husbands before she was twenty-four and, in Furnivall’s Victorian parlance, was ‘no better than a baggage’.42 The two years of press freedom which Burma had enjoyed effectively came to an end, never to return.
The government realized that the police were unrealiable, the volunteer brigades were hostile and the army was split down the middle. It vacillated, embarking now on a half-hearted purge of the army and pleading secretly for help from the British. At the same time, though, it confused matters by trying to improve relations with the communists in private discussions. To the annoyance of the British government, Nu again publicly denounced ‘imperialists’ – their identity was scarcely concealed – in an attempt to curry favour with his leftist former colleagues.43 Yes, of course compensation would be given to British firms, the government said, but this was no different from the compensation given to Western firms by the recently installed communist government in Czechoslovakia. And Burma’s debt repayment to the British was no different from the one embarked on by the communist USSR in the 1920s. Anyway, the British government was itself socialist; it had simply avoided the Soviet way of blood, pleaded Nu, once again longing for retirement to a monastery.
Though Nu’s speech stirred up a flurry of pained letters from the British ambassador and even a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger epistle from Stafford Cripps, this trimming cut little ice with the communists.44 It also made the War Office even more suspicious about handing over military hardware to Burma. Relations between the two governments were further strained when the Burmese began alleging that British military procurement and sale in the whole of South East Asia Command was corrupt. They had been reliably informed that huge quantities of military stores, which should have gone to Burma under the Attlee–Nu agreement, were actually being sold off on the Singapore black market and were probably finding their way into the hands of Malayan and Burmese communists.45 In Rangoon itself there were persistent rumours and allegations that the British military supply board (a civilian organization) was in cahoots with local Anglo-Burmese and Indian businessmen. Rather than selling to government, it was secretly disposing of war surplus to the highest bidder, in the best traditions of the old ‘black-market administration’ of 1945. Whitehall was somewhat muted in its response to these allegations because they seemed only too plausible.
Besides denouncing the British, Nu tried other ways to revive national unity and outflank the communists. In early April he masterminded a final burial ceremony for the embalmed remains of Aung San and his colleagues. Medical opinion supported the interment; the bodies, still lying in state in the Jubilee Hall, were decomposing rapidly.46 But Furnivall understood the political motive behind the ceremony: Nu’s attempt to invoke the spirit of Aung San to revive the old wartime nationalist alliance. Members of the armed forces drew Bogyoke’s bier to his last resting place and some communist leaders attended the burial, but past comradeship could not hide present differences. On 8 May the final act of this older drama was played out. At dawn on this cloudy morning U Saw walked out of his prison cell wearing his usual jacket and a longyi. He chatted briefly with his guards and shook the hands of the men who were about to hang him.47 All appeals, private and public, had failed. Dorman-Smith could do nothing for him, even though he had written a letter to him claiming that the trial was biased and had publicly declared, ‘I know U Saw. I know him to be an honest man.’48 In fact, as Furnivall noted, ‘Dorman-Smith’s appeal for mercy on behalf of U Saw was perhaps the most certain way of ensuring his execution’, as most Burmese believed that Dorman-Smith was somehow connected with the assassination of Aung San.49 British associates who might have taken some of the blame for murder had been quietly frog-marched off the political stage, to the relief of both governments. In his final moments, U Saw turned to Buddhist priests, saying, ‘He who dares to do things, must dare bear the consequences.’ Two of his Burmese associates were hanged with him. Later that day Nu hosted a rally for peasants in Fytche Square, newly renamed Bandula Park after the antique Burmese martial hero. He urged his audience to grow more food. With U Saw dead, almost the last link with the Burmese high politics of the 1930s had been severed.