In 2007, as the ‘Asian century’ begins and the economies of the crescent from India to Singapore are booming, it is difficult to imagine the scale of suffering and conflict that occurred during and after the Second World War in Asia. For much of the region, August 1945 was at best a hiatus in the fighting, and for many people the worst was yet to come. The continuing toll remained heaviest on civilians; the number of deaths from war-related famine in India, Indo-China and south China alone was close to 6 million. Millions more were driven from their homes and countries during the war and the numerous petty but lethal conflicts that surged on for decades in its aftermath. With the fall of Japan, the Great Asian War entered a new phase: it became a struggle against Western imperialism and its allies; a war for national freedom and for a new ordering of society. What gave the years from 1945 to 1949 their peculiar epochal quality was a sense of being part of a great acceleration in time, of living at a moment of unprecedented change. The days of Japanese occupation had a millennial edge to them; but any promise of peace and righteousness was soon destroyed by repression, exploitation and hunger. The fall of Japan came when many societies were at their lowest ebb: battle scarred, battle hardened, at war with one another. But as the Malay radical Mustapha Hussain had earlier reflected, ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.1Now history seemed open, at a juncture when the peoples of colonial Asia could shape their own future as they had not been able to do within living memory.
As the British sought to regain their Asian empire, they were confronted by myriad mutinies against old patterns of authority. This was Asia’s revolutionary moment when many previously disempowered groups in society – women, the young, workers and peasants – took the political initiative, for a time, as they tried to rebuild their communities, salvage their livelihoods and regain their dignity. They joined movements that were fired by radical ideologies – social democracy, religious revival, Marxism and Maoism – and these doctrines reacted with each other in a dangerous alchemy. It was, to use the phraseology of the Indonesian pergerakan, or movement, an age in motion, a world upside-down. New leaders addressed an often bewildered people in exhilarating new language. In the words of the Malay radicals:
The People’s Constitution of PUTERA is based on elections, kedaulatan rakyat [sovereignty of the people], and moves towards social justice, and egalitarianism, without upper and lower classes in the bangsa [nation] except according to the capability, intelligence and industry of the individual. We hope in this matter the rakyat no longer have any doubts, but instead have more faith in the struggle and loyalty to their respective movements. Because of this we appeal once more, struggle onwards with a fiery spirit, but with a cool head until the sacred aims that we aspire to are achieved. Remember, comrades, that the world is changing fast and we cannot live with the understandings and feelings that we had in the year 1941. We are now in the year 1947 in the atomic age, the old era has passed.2
For many, this sense of possibility, this call to be the agents of historical change, was irresistible.
Everywhere men and women were still in arms. During the Second World War the Allies and the Japanese had armed and militarized many ethnic minorities whose identities had previously conformed only loosely to the labels applied by colonial administrators and anthropologists. Karens, Kachins, Shans, Chins, Nagas and, in Malaya, the Orang Asli all now possessed weapons, military know-how and identifiable enemies to rally against. Many of the local soldiers who took part in these actions had been displaced by the ending of the international war and were hungry for combat and special operations. Militant nationalists, communists and Islamists were still continuing to fight for their vision of the good society among the ravaged and hungry peasant communities and impoverished townspeople. The aims of the radicals and ethnic leaderships were constrained by their limited range, but the war also left its imprint on the aims and conduct of the leaders of the dominant emerging nationalities. Coercion, summary execution and assassination were the orders of the day. And unlike western Europe, where the American military blanket had established stability and a respite from war, the returning colonial powers in Southeast Asia had triggered or participated in a host of further conflicts. Where the colonial powers had been forced to withdraw, as in India, Indonesia and Burma, the creation of national states seemed like the continuation of war by other means.
Yet whilst these struggles – these forgotten wars – were by no means over by 1949, there was by the end of the decade a palpable sense that one era of conflict was coming to an end and another beginning. The freedom struggles in Asia were being eclipsed and overtaken by another global confrontation. By 1949, with the Berlin airlift and signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, the battles lines were drawn in Europe for the Cold War. As the Iron Curtain came down, eastern and western Europe settled to a superficially peaceful period of standoff and suspicion under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the Red Army. After 1949 American Marshall Plan aid and, later, the initiatives of the European Economic Community began to spread a fragile prosperity, at least in the west of the continent. In Asia, by contrast, the political and economic future was much less predictable. By 1949 some struggles, at least, seemed to have been resolved. The new regime in Beijing had reunified most of China, and in New Delhi Nehru governed the world’s largest popular democracy. Yet these massive political achievements spawned new and equally vicious wars. China’s Red Army, unlike its Soviet counterpart, had not imposed a peace on the countries beyond its borders, and within them Mao Zedong’s communists began their programme of liquidating China’s landlords. To the west the leaderships of India and Pakistan began a pointless series of wars over the possession of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. The revival of the Japanese economy and the ceaseless toil of the hardy Indian and Chinese business communities saw a slow trickle of the lifeblood of trade back into cities such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. But most of Asia’s people remained desperately poor. And with the looming confrontation on the Korean peninsula, Asia was to experience the Cold War at its most heated.
The Cold War brought new violence to the end of empires as the local struggles in Southeast Asia were now seen as a part of a global chain of conflicts between the two power blocs. Reduced in political might and fearing the spread of communism, the waning colonial powers – Britain, France and the Netherlands – redeployed the weapons of the Second World War in the guise of counter-insurgency campaigns in those territories where they retained a fragile hold. As a result the hopes for liberal democracy that had sustained for decades colonial nationalists and European liberals alike were largely dashed. The advocates of social revolution were now fighting for their lives. The Malayan Emergency saw a retreat by the British government from a liberal, late colonialism towards a police state. By the end of the next decade soldiers and their associated ideologues were poised to take power in Burma, Indonesia and Pakistan. Even in India, the republic’s fragility in its early years resulted in a dangerous slowing down of radical political and economic change. National and social revolutions had either run into obstacles or been only partially accomplished. The old bureaucracies lived to fight another day.
In the midst of this, Britain’s Asian empire survived. But, increasingly, the United States was taking over key strategic responsibilities in parts of Asia which for a century had fallen to the Pax Britannica. Not yet an empire itself, America was now the arbiter of others. American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States’ commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. A major review of Britain’s long-term policy in Southeast Asia for the cabinet in October 1949 continued to see a British role there as indispensable to world peace, but it also acknowledged that ‘no plans will, however, be really successful without American participation’.3 On these terms, the British imperial presence endured in Malaya until 1957, in Singapore for five years after this, and in Hong Kong for another forty years.
But these were insular outposts and no longer a great territorial empire. By 1949 British Asia – the great crescent of land that four years earlier had linked Suez to Sydney in one overarching, cosmopolitan swathe – had collapsed. Its last great proconsul, Louis Mount-batten, had finally left the region. The old Indian Army was dismantled. The new sovereign nations of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (though not Burma) remained in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But this was a fragile, racially divided entity, and many more concrete linkages in the region were severed. The route from India to China, via the Burma Road, was closed, and these two emerging Asian superpowers squared up to each other along the line drawn in the Himalayas by the Victorian soldier Sir Henry McMahon. A world of travel and movement was finally stilled. After the last traumatic crossings in the wake of partition in south Asia and the revolutionary struggles in the southeast and east of the continent, most movements thereafter would be within borders. The ‘George Washington of the Overseas Chinese’, Tan Kah Kee, had returned to China and would die in Beijing in 1961. Never again would the Overseas Chinese act as a unified force. The new Indian republic still looked to play a role in the region, but this too was increasingly shaped by Cold War concerns. In 1950 Nehru again visited Singapore, bringing with him his daughter, Indira. More so than in 1946, the British welcomed his visit; he arrived in the wash of Anglo-Indian naval manoeuvres in the Bay of Bengal, and the British hoped he would voice support for their counter-insurgency. Nehru’s reception by the locals was warm, but it was a faint echo of the triumphant progress of 1946. His speeches signalled the changes: ‘Indians in Malaya’, he announced, ‘should not look to India for any help; neither is India in a position to render any because she has her own problems to solve and her own population to look after.’4 Nehru told a rally in Jalan Besar, where he had spoken in 1946: ‘We have seen plenty of killing and become rather callous but this method of terrorism is degrading to the whole human race and reduced men to the level of beasts.’ ‘In the present day’, he explained, ‘governments have to deal with all kinds of violence and force and inevitably they have to deal with that with force.’5
The British war in Malaya would drag on until 1960 and eventually claim the lives of 6,697 CTs ‘communist terrorists’ (not all of whom were combatants), 1,865 members of the security forces, most of them Malay policeman, and 2,473 civilians, most of them Chinese.6 The fury of counter-terror did not abate. In the second year of the Emergency veterans of clandestine warfare or colonial police operations in the Middle East and Africa continued to gravitate to Malaya. On the recommendation of Field Marshal Slim, Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, who had been second-in-command to Orde Wingate in Burma, was sent in 1950 to review the situation. On an early foray into the forest he was welcomed by a grenade, lobbed at him with the pin still in. To it was attached the message: ‘How do you do, Mr Calvert’. The Emergency remained a very personal war. ‘I went to the brothels and picked up the gossip of the gutter’, he recalled, and after six months he delivered a tough-minded report. British troops, he concluded, lacked aggression. One Scots Guards officer was allegedly heard to say that it was not his job ‘just to chase bare-arsed niggers around South East Asia’. Calvert recommended the formation of a deep-jungle penetration force, which included Orang Asli.7 From this the Special Air Squadron was revived as ‘The Malayan Scouts (SAS Regiment)’. They adopted a Malay kris as their emblem, but the ethos and philosophy was that of the Chindits: informal, unorthodox and hard living. By September 1950 the Malayan Scouts camp at Dusun Tua was filled with ex-Chindits, volunteer national servicemen and unruly elements from other units of which their commanding officers were trying to rid themselves. It even attracted a group of French foreign legionnaires who had deserted en route to Indo-China. Still the foe was elusive; one eight-week training mission from October 1950 brought no contact with the insurgents, and the unit attracted press criticism and the hostility of other units over its lax discipline, wild parties and the wearing of beards. New drafts for the SAS from the United Kingdom were appalled, and Calvert was recalled.8 In late 1951 the force was reorganized by Lieutenant Colonel John Sloane and many of the locally recruited men were sent back to their units. But from this a highly specialized form of warfare evolved, fought by shock troops, in which guerrilla warfare was met with its own methods.9
This was not a war which the British could win alone: in mid-November 1951, there were deployed in Malaya seven British infantry battalions, eight Gurkha battalions, three ‘colonial’ battalions and the Malayan Scouts, two Royal Armoured Corps regiments, one Royal Marine commando brigade, four battalions of the Malay Regiment, ten RAF squadrons, two Royal Australian Air Force squadrons and a small naval contingent. This reliance on imperial auxiliaries remained controversial and nearly collapsed when Nepalese communists campaigned to dissuade young men from joining the Gurkhas and Indian opposition parties in the Lok Sabha pressurized Nehru to end the use of the ‘sacred soil’ of India to recruit for the war in Malaya.10 The British looked further afield. Calvert had preferred Australian and Rhodesian recruits, in whom he felt the frontier spirit of empire still burned. He even travelled to apartheid South Africa to seek new drafts of men. But white troops were expensive. Instead, the first African units of the King’s African Rifles arrived in 1951 and would rotate in Malaya for the next few years. But for the Mau Mau rebellion, more of these askaris would have been sent. Most had joined for the improved pay and allowances, but they had a tough time in Malaya. It was fallaciously assumed that Africans were ‘natural’ jungle fighters, but the conditions were entirely new to them. So too was the diet. They were supplied from Australia with an ‘African’ maize meal, posho, which was often too roughly or finely ground for their taste. They were viewed with suspicion on all sides. In the field they were put to the task of ‘shamba bashing’ – the destruction of food crops in the jungle – and the communists put it about that they were cannibals. The askaris were poorly paid compared to the Gurkhas and Fijian soldiers, the latter mostly volunteers from the poor lesser islands. The Africans were given large bonuses to make up the difference, but they still chafed at their humiliating, inferior khaki uniforms: which had no collar, pockets, belt loops or fly. ‘They were insulting’, one veteran would recall, ‘… and brought us no respect’. When the Maasai education officer who led the protests against the uniforms was threatened with court martial his askaris promised him that they would ‘take care’ of any difficult officers on the next jungle patrol. The scragging of officers was not unheard of in the Burma campaign. Veterans of 3 King’s African Rifles were later to attribute their sympathy with the Mau Mau to their experience of the anti-colonial struggle in Asia.11
Despite these reinforcements, there were times during the MNLA’s flurry of small-scale raids in 1950 and 1951 when the British felt that they were losing the war. There was little co-ordination between the army and police, the chief police officer and the director of intelligence were not on speaking terms, the morale of European civilians was breaking and the rural Chinese seemed entirely indifferent to the government. In 1950 there was an attempt on the life of the governor of Singapore, Sir Franklin Gimson, at Happy World amusement park, where he was adjudicating a boxing competition. The grenades failed to explode and he escaped with a bruised leg. But on 6 October 1951 the MNLA scored its most dramatic success. In the early afternoon a guerrilla unit ambushed a Rolls-Royce bearing a crown insignia and the Federation flag, driving behind a police Land Rover on the narrow winding ascent up to the colonial playground of Frazer’s Hill. It seems that the attack was unplanned and that the guerrillas did not know that they had stumbled on the most valuable prey of all, the high commissioner himself. Sir Henry Gurney faced the attack with courage and presence of mind, drawing fire away from his wife, who survived the attack by crouching in the car, which was riddled with thirty-five bullet holes. Gurney was shot in the head and the body and died almost instantly. His escort was stranded further down the road due to a mechanical fault. Gurney was the last colonial governor to be killed in office, and his death was another augury of the passing of liberal imperialism.12 The news broke in the middle of a general election campaign in Britain, and in December the new Conservative colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, toured Malaya to assess the situation for himself. When he visited Ipoh on 5 December to meet planters he was protected by 350 policemen and troops and driven from Ipoh airfield in a closed armoured car with an escort of six others. There a Chinese tin miner, Foo Yin Fong, told him that the Chinese villagers distrusted the police, who treated them with no respect, and that the resettlement officers ‘paid little attention to Chinese customs and feelings, and appeared not to regard them as human beings’.13 On his return Lyttelton delivered a stinging verdict on the failings of administration in Malaya. This was reinforced by a minute from Montgomery: ‘We must have a plan,’ he told Lyttelton. ‘Secondly, we must have a man.’14
The man with the plan was General Sir Gerald Templer, a former director of military intelligence with experience of civil affairs on a large scale in crisis-ridden post-war Germany, during which he had famously sacked Konrad Adenauer as mayor of Cologne.15 He was not the first choice. Slim, for one, had ruled himself out as being ‘too old to go flipping around in an Auster aircraft in the trying climate of Malaya’. There were rumours that Montgomery himself had been asked to go. Malcolm MacDonald, in Singapore, was alarmed at the prospect of ‘military dictatorship’. Templer was, and remains, a controversial figure. In some accounts he is credited with a mastery of the crisis that has few parallels in British colonial history. The historian C. Northcote Parkinson saw in him a Shakespearean hero. His most savage critic was the architect of the Malayan Spring, Victor Purcell, who was also a history don, at Cambridge, who returned to Malaya in 1953 as an adviser to the Malayan Chinese Association. He wrote a series of articles and a polemical book, Malaya: communist or free?, in which he accused Templer of authoritarian, even quasi-fascist methods: ‘a terrifying mixture of crassness and voodoo’.16 Their feud was bitter and personal, although Purcell was merely articulating what many Chinese leaders such as Tan Cheng Lock thought but felt unable to say directly and publicly. From this Templer emerges perhaps more plausibly as a useful if limited man, favoured by fortune and riding the tide of achievement of his predecessors; in the words of one Malayan civil servant, ‘a facile princeps’.17 Templer embodied Britain’s counter-insurgency in a way that Gurney had been unable to do. In his hands – as both high commissioner and director of operations – was concentrated more power than had been possessed by any British general since Oliver Cromwell. He used it to create a new integrated system of command and a functioning intelligence system, to cut through red tape, official parochialism and jealousies and to facilitate new specialist initiatives. He was constantly in the field, where his presence was likened to the charismatic dynamism of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny in Indo-China, and he took strong stands against diehard employers and colonial prejudice.18 In a hallmark incident, he threatened to run the committee of the elite Kuala Lumpur Lake Club out of town when they barred the Sultan of Selangor, as an ‘Asiatic’, from attending a St George’s day function in his own realm.
But Templer was a blunt instrument. One of his first actions following his arrival in March 1952 was to direct personally a draconian collective punishment operation against the town of Tanjong Malim, the scene of heavy guerrilla activity where recent government casualties had included a hero of ‘the wooden horse’ POWescapade, Lieutenant R. M. C. Codner. Templer would descend on truculent resettlement areas to parade and berate their inhabitants. In one famous incident he began, ‘You are all bastards.’ A Chinese interpreted: ‘His Excellency says that none of your parents were married.’ ‘Well’, continued Templer, ‘I can be a bastard too.’ ‘His Excellency says his parents were also unmarried.’19 But as he himself admitted, Templer was building on the foundations of the work of Gurney and others. The key component of the campaign – resettlement on a mass scale – had been begun in earnest in Gurney’s time by Sir Harold Briggs, who was pulled out of retirement after his campaigns in Burma to become the first director of operations. He developed a plan to ‘roll up’ Malaya from the south.20 This began in, as those responsible admitted, an experimental and ‘rough and ready’ fashion in June 1950 in Johore. As one European resident put it: ‘This fair land is now, it would appear, in danger of becoming infested with a series of untidy, shabby shanty towns: a succession of inferior Butlin’s camps but lacking the amenities.’21 The programme was largely completed by the end of 1952. What Templer achieved was co-ordination of Emergency work with the everyday business of government. He also possessed a stronger mandate from Whitehall, and a clearer appreciation of the impending advance of self-government. This added a new dynamism to local politics that had been paralysed by the Emergency. Again, there was little new in the letter of Templer’s statements on the transfer of power delivered on his installation in Kuala Lumpur; the commitment was already there. But Templer set about executing it with the briskness of a country solicitor winding up a heavily entailed estate.22
The counter-insurgency regime created by the British in Malaya was perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of any colonial state. In the ‘New Villages’ – which became the new official euphemism – health services, sports halls and village councils were introduced; propaganda acquired a new relevance and the official vernacular embraced new terms such as ‘community development’ – a vague catch-all for a miscellany of initiatives in leadership training, by which, in the words of one official, the people were to be ‘suitably instructed towards their own emancipation’.23 A favoured keyword of Templer himself was ‘service’; it began with a scheme to make the police appear more friendly to the community, inspired, it was said, by the scene in The Wizard of Oz where a lion is made brave after receiving a medal for courage. Templer had been a keen Boy Scout, from which experience he seems to have drawn many of his ideas; his wife, Peggy, lent her patronage to the Women’s Institutes, in which elite wives brought their home skills to the New Villages and kampongs. Purcell felt ‘service’ to be a particularly pernicious substitute for the development of democratic institutions. All this entailed a massive expansion of government outside the counter-insurgency campaign; from local government and town-and-country planning to the electricity grid and the road network. This resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match. It also created a strong – and potentially overbearing – state: the number of its employees grew from 48,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1959. Equally, the ravages of war and occupation were repaired to a degree that Burma never experienced. But the idea that ‘winning hearts and minds’ was a carefully prepared strategy is a myth. The classic manual was written – by Robert Thompson, an ex-Chindit, Chinese affairs officer and later secretary for defence in Malaya – only after the Emergency had ended.24 At the time the strategy was an ‘agglomeration of trifles’, and it proceeded mainly by trial and error. Many of the ‘after-care’ measures, as they were termed, arrived in fits and starts some time after the worst effects of resettlement – the uprooting, banishments, loss of income, exposure to corruption and exploitation – had already been experienced by rural Chinese. As the novelist Han Suyin wrote of a New Village in Johore, where she set her novel And the Rain my Drink…:
The dirt road was a new gash across the jungle. There, at the edge of a foetid mangrove swamp, between the thrusting mangrove spikes like a field of spears for miles… was the ‘New Village’, spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, huddled there, foot deep in brackish mud. There were some ataphuts with zinc roofs, obviously brought from elsewhere. I shall never forgot the pale and puffy faces: beri-beri, or the ulcers on their legs. Their skin had the hue of the swamp.25
The routine harassment of women and men by strip-searching during the daily food searches as people left the village of Semenyih became a public scandal; the official report painted a picture of proud and individualistic cultivators, goaded by the daily indignity almost beyond endurance.26 The military still dealt in crude racial stereotypes, and Templer’s personal endorsement of a thinly disguised soldier’s fiction, Jungle Green, with its racist language, caused a storm among the Chinese community. The charge that the British were, at bottom, ‘playing the race card’ was never dispelled.27 But ‘hearts and minds’ was the subject of a carefully orchestrated campaign of press coverage, not least to offset the mounting criticism, and it began to attract international attention. Malaya would eventually become a textbook case, to be applied beyond its borders from Vietnam – where Thompson led a British advisory mission – and, into the twenty-first century, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British would take the credit for defeating communism in Malaya, but if the essence of ‘hearts and minds’ lay in creating a sense of security and confidence, that allowed people to pursue their livelihoods with reasonable freedom and in reasonable safety, and in the absence of intimidation, and so encourage them to identify with government initiatives, other factors were crucial. The British in Malaya were rescued by the economy. By 1951 the cost of maintaining and operating forces was £48.5m. The extra cost to the federal government was £13.8m and its total costs came to £29m out of a budget of £66m.28 This was a crippling burden, and it was entirely fortuitous that the British were able to meet it through the windfall of the Korean War boom in Malaya’s raw materials. This was a time of relative prosperity for some. Little of it was enjoyed by labourers; wage increases were absorbed by price inflation and undercut by the recession that followed the boom. The chronic poverty in which communism flourished diminished only slightly. But above all, Asian business revived. The profits of Chinese towkays were increasingly reinvested in Malaya, in rubber estates and in shares in locally registered companies. The leading Chinese bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, was on a par with the European concerns and held two-thirds of the total deposits of Chinese banks in Malaya. Tan Cheng Lock was a director both of OCBC and of the colonial concern Sime Derby.29 This was important because much of the burden of counter-insurgency – for relief and after-care – fell on Malayans, and the decisive shifts in the conflict came within Malayan society itself. This was chiefly the process whereby the Chinese consolidated their stake in the country and the Chinese leadership, now gathered together in the Malayan Chinese Association, consolidated its grip on the community. In this the British, of course, played a role; in encouraging Chinese enlistment in the police, in the vital struggle to give land title to resettled farmers. But often the British were bystanders.30 Obscure battles for control in the New Villages, or over village councils or in the Chinese schools, became key. The resources of the Chinese community were gradually amassed behind the government. In Perak the Kuomintang guerrillas were mobilized into a Kinta Home Guard. The Emergency was also fought by Malay officials as they sought to recover their authority in troubled Malay kampongs. But Malay wrath at the administrative attention showered on the erstwhile supporters of the communists was only partially assuaged by the expansion of rural health services and development funds. Malay policemen continued to bear the brunt of the casualties and they particularly resented another key aspect of the strategy: the rewards – sometimes thousands of dollars – paid to surrendered guerrillas who turned coat and informed on their comrades. ‘Why should they risk their necks to help the [surrendered communists] get rewards greater than anything they were ever likely to come by?’31 It was a battle to reconstruct communities, and for the elite to restore the networks and patron–client relationships that had been so damaged in the Japanese occupation. This was done increasingly on an ethnic basis. Above all, the fate of the rebellion in Malaya was decided by the continuing rapprochement between Malay administrative power and Chinese economic muscle.
Independence in Malaya was won by the alliance of conservatively inclined ethnic-based parties that had begun to form through the Communities Liaison Committee in 1949. The British still believed that something more was needed; a more authentic ‘united Malayan nation’ in Templer’s brief – and they still pinned their hopes on Dato Onn bin Jaafar to create it, although Lyttelton was less enamoured by him than were his predecessors. In 1950 and again in 1951, Onn argued that UMNO should open its doors to non-Malays. He was ultimately rejected by his party, and amid much lamenting stepped down as leader. He launched an Independence for Malaya Party the same year, with the backing of Tan Cheng Lock and other liberal Chinese. The idea behind it was that it would present a unified front for independence, and that the ethnic parties would dwindle into welfare bodies. MacDonald and Gurney had high hopes for it. But Onn’s refusal to embrace the cause of immediate independence, his insistence that the Malays still needed colonial protection, did not win over popular Malay opinion, nor that of the non-Malays, many of whom still mistrusted him. His was an elite patriotism grounded in the public service, and his principal allies included many of the chief ministers of the Malay States. Even the British began to lose patience with Onn. As Templer told him in April 1953, in the presence of US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, one of the first of a growing number of visiting American observers: ‘You are going to be forced to take independence.’ To which Onn’s response, to Stevenson in private, was: ‘I want independence, but I want to keep it.’32 Onn first refused, and then accepted in 1953 a KBE; he was given official standing and patronage as the first Member for Home Affairs and head of the Rural and Industrial Development Agency. But he never again commanded the support of his countrymen, and ended his career in the political wilderness.
The logic of Malayan politics was moving in a different direction. Against all expectation, UMNO – which had never been a strong organization – revived. The contest for a new leader pitched the old veteran Mustapha Hussain, against a 48-year-old prince of Kedah, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Both were unlikely candidates. Mustapha’s standing was unexpected, even to himself, because he was still on hard times selling mee (noodles). Few of the Malay radicals outside jail had such leadership experience, and they searched for a voice, but they did not prevail. The Tunku’s name had been canvassed by the former Labour minister David Rees-Williams, and some questioned his nationalist credentials. Yet during the war, as a district officer, he had distinguished himself in welfare work for Malay victims of the Burma–Siam railway, and afterwards flirted with the Malay radicals in Kedah. Many observers, not least British officials, underestimated his political acumen and also his tenacity.33 He possessed a strong sense of the original sovereignty of the Malay people. ‘Who are these “Malayans”?’ he asked in his first speech as UMNO leader. ‘This country was received from the Malays and to the Malays it ought to be returned. What is called “Malayans”; therefore let the Malays alone settle who they are.’34 The Tunku was no intellectual; he was remembered during his time at Cambridge chiefly as ‘Prince Bobby’ at the Huntingdon races, for canvassing for the Liberal Party in his Riley sports car, for clocking up twenty-three traffic offences in sixteen years of study, and for being responsible for the proctors’ ruling in Cambridge University that banned the use of motor cars by undergraduates. But he surrounded himself with younger, energetic men – such as the Pahang notable Abdul Razak bin Hussein – and when Malay radicals began to be released from detention between 1953 and 1955 many joined UMNO, giving new vitality to its grass roots. It also held the loyalty of much of the growing army of state servants, school-teachers and policemen. When the Conservative government seemed to be backpedalling on elections and the transfer of power in 1954, the Tunku threatened non-cooperation. The British blinked and came to terms. But, in the knowledge that a condition of self-government was that the ethnic communities would create a unified political front, the Tunku had also built a fresh understanding with the Malayan Chinese Association, on the basis of the Communities Liaison Committee ‘bargain’. It became a political force when an electoral alliance was mooted by local leaders to contest the first Kuala Lumpur municipal elections in February 1952. Both UMNO and the MCA now reorganized as political parties and soon became a formal, well-financed and enduring electoral alliance, the basis of Malaysia’s government to this day.
Not all the ex-detainees were reconciled to UMNO. Khatijah Sidek was released from jail in Singapore and banished to Johore Bahru. With a baby, born in jail, to support and another on the way, she opened a restaurant there, serving fiery Minangkabau food from her home in Sumatra. She called it the Merdeka Restaurant. She joined UMNO’s women’s wing, the Kuam Ibu. It had a reputation as a movement led by the wives of the aristocracy and elite, but Khatijah now drew in the commoners. She learnt that they feared the word Merdeka [freedom]: ‘Perhaps someone will say to you: ”Whoever says Merdeka will go to jail, or will be beaten,”’ she told them. ‘But I have just said Merdeka very loud and very clearly, and the police are there, yet they are not arresting me.’ She taught, in the manner of the Indonesian revolution, the cry Merdeka to the mothers, and for the mothers to pass it on to their children. Yet many in the party mistrusted her and the Tunku warned her not to be so free with the word. She noted that the Malays ‘even softened the word Merdeka itself into Merde-heka, making it longer and softer, unlike Merdeka, which is short and sharp’. When she began to campaign for more representation for women within the party, she was expelled from UMNO. ‘They only wanted independence slowly and gently, and perhaps did not really want to be so independent at all.’35 Her political journey would eventually lead her into the Islamic opposition, but it too was an uncomfortable home for her. By the mid 1950s the various aliran, or streams of consciousness, within Malay radicalism had begun to drift apart. In the wake of religious riots, an Islamic Party was founded by leading ulama who felt that the mainstream national leaders had failed to defend the Muslim community. It drew in many who supported the Hizbul Muslimin in 1948, but also began to recruit from the more traditional religious schools and bureaucracies of the impoverished rural heartlands of northern and eastern states, peasants and village religious leaders. Shortly after his release from detention in 1955 Dr Burhanuddin looked to realize his Islam-centred philosophy of nationhood by taking up the leadership of the party. After seven years in prison Ahmad Boestamam formed a new secular, socialist party, the Partai Rakyat and there was a further attempt to rally non-Malay support for a ‘democratic, secular state’ in a new Labour Party.36 But Boestamam and other survivors of the non-Malay left never regained the political prominence they had achieved from 1945 and 1948, nor did they build a trans-ethnic movement that was able to compete with the support mobilized on racial lines within the Alliance. When the first federal elections were held in 1955 the Islamic Party won the only opposition seat. Candidates of the UMNO–MCA Alliance – now extended to included the Malayan Indian Congress – were returned for the remainder on a landslide. Onn was defeated in his native Johore. People were casting their vote for freedom. It was an overwhelmingly Malay election. Of the 1,280,000 registered to vote, 84 per cent were Malays, 11 per cent Chinese and 5 per cent Indians. Of the 600,000 Chinese eligible to register, only 140,000 did so: one eighth of the total Chinese population. Nevertheless, under the alliance formula, seventeen non-Malay candidates were successful and it won an overwhelming 79.6 per cent of the popular vote.37 Tunku Abdul Rahman now formed a ministry, if not a government.
The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely. What redeemed it, in the eyes of the British, was the idea only. In their vision for Malaya they looked to atone for the humiliation of 1942, and they saw late-colonial rule as ‘the completion of a stewardship’. But they failed in the core objective that had shaped policy since 1942: to form a ‘Malayan’ nationalism that was organic and multiracial. In asking, ‘Who are these “Malayans”?’, Tunku Abdul Rahman gave a different answer. Whilst there could be a Malayan nation based on clearer defined citizenship rights for non-Malays, the core of the nation, the bearers of its original sovereignty, were the Malays. The British now prepared to devolve power to a coalition of ethnic parties. This was a long way from what they wanted to see. But it was a political solution they were willing to take. In any case, Malcolm MacDonald’s idealism now had a less receptive audience in the Conservative government in London; it was felt he had spent too long living on the equator to be able to see things clearly. In 1955, as the transfer of power approached, he left the region, though not for good; he was still to serve as high commissioner in India. It was left to the last of Britain’s Asian supremos, Sir Robert Scott, who had himself been present at the fall of Singapore, to anoint the successor regime: ‘Tunku Abdul Rahman has an overwhelming Parliamentary majority’, he told the prime minister, Anthony Eden; ‘the local forces and police are largely Malay, and for his own ends he will keep legal powers to detain without trial… He gives the impression of aiming at an old-fashioned Muslim dictatorship, with some democratic trappings, ready if need be to deal ruthlessly with Chinese who give trouble.’38
But in 1955 few could argue that Malaya was ‘not yet ready’ for independence. Of their Asian subjects, it was the Malay rulers who perhaps had the most to lose from the severance of the colonial connection. One of the first public functions of the new chief minister, with six of his colleagues, was to represent the government at the diamond jubilee of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore. When Ibrahim succeeded his father in 1895, the Malay States had not yet entirely submitted to British rule. He had inherited from his father a vigorous, reforming monarchy, and in accepting British ‘protection’, he still retained many of his privileges and even his own armed forces. The sultan had spent little time in Malaya since the war, having been mostly away in Europe. He had returned briefly in 1951 only to complain of the ‘most damnable’ noise of RAF flights over his palace, and had requested them to avoid his capital altogether; it reminded him too much of 1941. Less than six weeks after his return he set sail again for England.39 But in 1955 he was met with a splendid gathering; the crowds that streamed across the causeway from Singapore were so immense that traffic could not cross. The sultan gave a speech in his trademark mixture of English and Malay. He spoke in forthright tones, striking the floor with the end of his sword as he did so. ‘I don’t like it at all,’ he said. ‘My head is disturbed. I say if I remain here, I shall probably go mad – thinking of my people.’ He continued:
It is easy to say I want independence. I want to be happy. I can buy slaves. I myself do not buy slaves. But I know there are people who buy human beings. It is not that we do not want to ask for Merdeka. We too, do not want to ask for Merdeka? We ask for it – Then we ask for independence. But what? Why do we want independence? Where are our warships? Where is our army? Where are our planes which can repel an invading army?40
The speech caused an uproar and the ministers did not attend the rest of the functions. It showed that, in so many ways, the formal transfer of power was only a beginning.
The semi-elected government now entered the strange twilight phase of unequal power-sharing with the British. In Singapore a coalition led by the Labour Front of David Marshall achieved a similar status. On arriving to begin work, both of the new chief ministers found that the British had not seen fit to provide them with offices. Marshall – who horrified the governor of Singapore with his trademark open-necked bush jacket and the bare feet and sandals of some of his ministers – only prevailed when he threatened to set up shop ‘under the old apple tree’ outside the government offices in Empress Place. It was here that he introduced his ministers to the people.41 But however constrained the new regimes were, across the Thai border the MCP leadership realized that they placed in jeopardy the legitimacy of their claims to fight for the nation. Through intermediaries, Chin Peng sued for peace. The fighting units drew back, and with a small bodyguard Chin Peng, the Malay leader Rashid Maidin and another veteran of the wartime resistance, Chen Tian, were met at the jungle fringe by an old Force 136 comrade, John Davis. On 28–29 December 1955 a meeting took place in the frontier town of Baling, in a school-house commandeered for the purpose. It was a condition of the gathering that Chin Peng would not be allowed to speak to the press, who scrambled for a first glimpse of the man on whom the British had already placed a $250,000 reward. A young Malay correspondent of Utusan Melayu, Said Zahari, was a witness: ‘In the midst of the flashing lights of photographers’ cameras, I saw apprehensive looks on the faces of the communist leaders. Chin Peng and Rashid Maidin looked straight and stiff, while Chen Tian turned rapidly to the left and to the right as if to avoid the cameras.’42 Malaya and Singapore were represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, David Marshall and Tan Cheng Lock, ill and frail after his injury in the MNLA bomb attack six years earlier.
The talks focused on the MCP’s desire to return to the status quoante bellum: on its right to function as an open political party and the question of whether the communists who laid down their arms would be able to return to Malaya without detention. ‘If you demand our surrender’, Chin Peng insisted, ‘we would prefer to fight to the last man.’ On this issue the talks broke down. But Chin Peng had also been given the impression that when the Tunku had negotiated independence from the British the talks might be reopened. The ability of the Tunku to negotiate on matters of internal security – the defining moment of the slow transfer of power – and Chin Peng’s apparent pledge to lay down arms when this was conceded, dominated proceedings, as was symbolized by Chen Tian’s theatrical scrutiny of the tape recorders running in an adjoining room. In agreeing to meet, the Tunku sought to boost his own reputation in relation to the British and with regard to Chin Peng. In both of these aims he was successful. In secret, the British had pondered the various contingencies should – against all advice – the Tunku seek to make a separate peace with Chin Peng. They had concluded that they could not afford to break with him. But this, it seems, was never his intention. As the Tunku walked away from the schoolroom Said Zahari asked him if he was disappointed. ‘No, I’m not. I never wanted it to be a success.’ These remarks were never reported.43 Perhaps more than any other event, the Baling talks cemented the Tunku’s reputation with the British as a safe pair of hands in which to transfer power. After them Chin Peng was delivered back to the jungle by John Davis. They camped and talked over ‘the good old days’. In vain Davis offered to come in with him and continue talking.44 Directly afterwards the Tunku, brandishing Chin Peng’s offer to lay down arms to an independent government, flew to London for the crucial negotiations for independence. He was met at the airport to be assured by the men from the Colonial Office that he was to be granted independence ‘on a silver platter’. But the negotiations with the communists were never reopened.