T H E FAT E O F N AT I O N A L I S M I N T H E N E W S TAT E S
129
coup and counter-coup in Jakarta in late 1965. By the mid-late 1960s, the fate
of nationalism was no longer dispersed among the highly mobilized, fractious
Burmese and Indonesian people, but rather concentrated in the hands of
increasingly insulated and narrowly centralized authoritarian regimes.
Despite these prominent similarities in their early post-independence trajectories, by the mid-late 1960s Burmese and Indonesian nationalisms were
already showing signs of divergence, which continued to widen over succeeding decades. In Burma, the army’s 1962 coup was not accompanied by a rightward shift in economic policy or geopolitical orientation, as seen in so many
U.S.-backed military regimes during the Cold War. Instead, the military
rulers committed themselves to promote the “Burmese Road to Socialism,”
enforcing economic autarchy while maintaining neutrality if not indifference
in the face of deepening U.S. intervention in Indochina and the abiding pressures of the Cold War.
This distinctively “isolationist” approach to national sovereignty and
economic independence can be understood in terms of Burma’s historical
experience of “foreign” penetration and its vulnerable location in the regional
context. Burma had been part of British India until 1937, and its small minority
of immigrant Indian merchants, moneylenders, and middleman had dominated
the colonial capital of Rangoon, occupied key niches in colonial state employment and urban wage labor, and controlled the commanding heights of the
densely commercialized core zone of wet-rice cultivation, the Irrawaddy
Delta, through landownership and control over credit, commercial networks,
and rice milling. Indian immigrants maintained close connections to their
neighboring homeland, leaving Burma a petty dependency within the vast
expanse of diasporic mercantile activity across the Indian Ocean.45
Indian immigrants were destined to be viewed as obstacles in the path of
Burmese nationalism, as seen in communal violence that accompanied nationalist mobilizing efforts in the late 1930s, and the goal of independence inevitably meant independence from Indians as much as from British rule. When the
Japanese invaded in early 1942, tens of thousands of Indian immigrants, including many colonial civil servants, army troops, and policemen, fled to India, and
those who remained or returned in the early aftermath of the war found themselves unwelcome in newly independent Burma. Government “nationalization”
and land redistribution policies largely eliminated their privileged position in
the economy, and citizenship restrictions rendered their continuing presence
in the country problematic. By 1962, the commitment to an economic nationalism that excluded Indian immigrant capital was established and difficult to
reverse. The years after the coup saw further emigration of Burma’s residual
45
Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian
Rice Frontier, 1825–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).