In early June 1950, almost at the midpoint of the twentieth century of the Christian era, the Buddhist prime minister of Burma, U Nu, began a course of meditation, the origins of which lay 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. Nu retreated into a hallowed meditation centre and vowed not to emerge until he had attained a certain stage in vipassana meditation, the Buddhist discipline that taught self-purification and equanimity. ‘Until then’, he told his ministers, ‘do not send for me even if the whole country is enveloped in flames. If there are flames, you must put them out yourself.’45 When told of U Nu’s practice of spending three of four hours a day in solitary prayer, Nehru remarked: ‘That seems to me as good a way of governing Burma as any.’46 But one of the main components of the state of consciousness which Nu believed that he had attained that summer was ‘freedom from fear’. As the Korean War entered a critical phase and the threat of global nuclear conflict grew ever closer, this was no easy goal. By the middle of the year, Allied forces in Korea seemed on the verge of conquering the whole peninsula and a major war with China and the Soviet Union loomed. In Britain Attlee broadcast to the nation of further preparations for war in Korea and also against Russia, ‘if another world war is to follow’.47 In Delhi, Nu’s closest foreign friend, Jawaharlal Nehru, urged the US to draw back, arguing that war solved nothing. In his alarm, he seemed to be conjuring up again the non-violent maxims of the late Mahatma Gandhi. Attacked by the Americans for appeasement of totalitarianism, Nehru was equally suspect in China and Russia for his suppression of Indian communists.48
In Burma itself, however, fear was retreating a little. The tide of war in the country was beginning to turn in the government’s favour and Burma’s positioning on the new map of Southeast Asia was becoming slightly clearer. In 1950 the Chinese communists finally defeated Chiang Kai Shek’s resistance on the mainland and the Viet Minh communists established a critical hold on the northwest of Vietnam. Yet 1950 was also the year when the hopes of the Malayan communist insurrection began to fade and Burmese communists lost their tactical advantage. In Burma the Karen and other minority revolts also surrendered their initial gains. The outcome of the Cold War in Asia seemed to be very evenly balanced. In the south of the region the British continued to provide a military presence that protected its capitalist economy, but further north the outcome remained uncertain. The leaders of the huge new Republic of India looked on with concern. Early in the year Nu was able to write with satisfaction to Nehru that a major Karen stronghold in the Irrawaddy delta had been retaken. He thanked the Indian prime minister for his moral and material support.49Nehru, for his part, was grateful to Burma for its rice exports at a time when India was suffering food shortages. Revived Japanese purchases and the backwash of the Korean War were pushing up prices throughout Asia. Nehru visited Burma to cement his quiet alliance in the middle of the year. J. S. Furnivall was impressed by Nehru’s moral courage, if not by his appearance: ‘He is such a small and apparently un-aggressive, unassuming little man that it is difficult to imagine how he came to be so important.’50
The period 1950 to 1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma. The government’s authority began to reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949, the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more ‘Maoist’ in their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak, and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over Rangoon, the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon’s fold.51
Under the surface of the government’s resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had appropriated more and more of the country’s diminished wealth. It benefited from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice. It benefited from the feeling that Nu’s botched land reforms had helped few but clients of the AFPFL leaders. The military gradually came to dominate the villages and to control the ministries and the police force. The first coup against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its Southeast Asian neighbours, suffering international sanctions and continuing local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.
The mid 1950s were a time of high tension across the whole of what had once been British Asia. The tenth anniversary of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged when they had still been under the yoke of Japanese occupation and colonial rule. For one thing, full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region. Indo-China had been at war every day since General Gracey’s ill-fated intervention had come to an end in the early months of 1946. At Dien Bien Phu, in April 1954, the French suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Viet Minh forces supplied with artillery and modern weapons by the Chinese and Russians. The Western fight against communist advance seemed to be deeply compromised, at least on this front. An American officer, Colonel Edward Lansdale, made a series of momentous journeys there during the course of 1954 and 1955.52 On 1 June 1954 he landed in Saigon, which was on the point of becoming the capital of a vivisected South Vietnam under the peace accords signed between the French and the Viet Minh in Geneva. He was part of a network of deadly expertise linking anti-communist special operations forces across Southeast Asia. A specialist in sabotage and psychological warfare, Lansdale had been an adviser to the cabal of right-wing strongmen who ran the Philippines. At the beginning of the 1950s he had helped the authorities put down the so-called Huk rebellion, a peasant uprising which the US government feared would drag the Philippines into the communist camp. Lansdale drew heavily on the British experience of counter-insurgency in Malaya while he was working in the Philippines and Vietnam. United States senators made the British colony a port of call on fact-finding visits to Asia. After Adlai Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed, came vice-president Richard Nixon, on whom Templer impressed the need to wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British imperial cause.53 But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk rebels were settled, gathering information for their own ‘New Villages’ on the peninsula.54
Lansdale’s journey to Saigon signalled the beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam. The looming conflict was also marked in fiction by Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, published in 1955.55 Greene, himself a former British agent, had been living in Saigon in 1952 when a series of bomb attacks rocked the French colonial city. The authorities blamed the communists, but Greene suspected a plot between right-wing Vietnamese militias and the CIA. He was probably right. A New York Times reporter just happened to be on the spot at the vital moment. Photographs of people maimed in the attack were speedily published under a headline blaming Ho Chi Minh for the violence. By 1955 Lansdale was certainly working hard to put in place a third force to take over from the French as a bulwark against the communists. In that year he helped organize a coup which placed the city of Saigon in the hands of the future dictator of South Vietnam, Ngo Din Diem. This final act of the unending war, the American struggle with North Vietnam, would run its bloody course to 1975. Meanwhile General Douglas Gracey, who had reinstalled the French in Saigon in 1945 and managed another post-colonial armed struggle between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, retired from his post as commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army.