The Case of Malaya

The post-Napoleonic settlement between Britain and the Netherlands in 1814-15 led directly to Britain's acquisition of the Netherlands East Indies to the east of Borneo and Java, and to Britain's recognized claim to the Malay peninsula. The old Portuguese outpost of Malacca had been acquired by Britain as early as the 1780's, and together with the island of Singapore at the tip of the Malayan peninsula and the island of Penang off of the west coast of Malaya, was grouped into the Colony of the Straits Settlements in 1824. A series of British protectorates established over the remainder of Malaya in the 1870's and 1880's led to the unification of the entire peninsula under British auspices.

The abundant tin deposits in the west of Malaya and the perfect climate for the growth of rubber plants (imported from Guyana in the 1880's, and grown commercially since 1896) created the basis for substantial British investment in Malayan tine mines and rubber plantations. The local Malay population was too sparse to serve as a sufficiently large source of labourers, and so, Indian and Chinese indentured labourers were imported on a massive scale. By the 1930's, Malays were outnumbered in nine of the 11 states and colonies under the aegis of British Malaya. Ethnic Chinese -- mainly emigrants from south China -- formed fully half of the Malayan population, and more in the colonies of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, but Indian communities tracing their roots to Tamil and Bengali immigration formed another fifth of the Malayan population.

During the Second World War, the Chinese and Indian populations of Malaya supported the League of Nations, out of a dislike for Japanese rule based on news of atrocities committed in China. Malays, for their part, favoured a Japanese conquest of Malaya out of a fear of Malay domination by immigrants. Despite this support for Japan, though, after the Pacific War the Malays were cultivated by Britain as the rulers of a post-colonial Malayan federation, through the United Malays National Organization. (The left-wing sympathies of most Malayan Chinese and Indians kept Britain from supporting a fully democratic regime, out of fear of a Communist takeover.) The Emergency of the early 1950's had seen police raids on Chinese and Indian community leaders, restrictions on assembly and political activity, censorship of the Chinese press, and the punishment of even suspected Communists, all imposed jointly by the British authorities and the Malayan governments.

When it gained independence as a federation in 1957, Malaya was an unstable pluriethnic state. The traditional Malay rulers and Malay nationalists tried to establish a Malaya run by Malays. To this end, a racial quota system was enacted that gave preference to Malays for education and government jobs, voter districts were gerrymandered in order to limit the number of voting districts without a mostly Malay voting population, and strict anti-Communist laws were imposed that limited the participation in public life of Chinese and Indians suspected of supporting even vaguely left-wing causes. The non-Malay majority states -- particularly Singapore, represented by native son Lee -- were exempted from most of these government restrictions, but resentment mounted.

Throughout the 1960's, Malaya enjoyed a comfortable rate of economic growth that placed it as the third-richest country in Asia, behind only Japan and Korea. Despite this growing wealth, though, the rising Chinese and Indian middle-classes were upset at their practical exclusion from political power. The non-Malay majority states of Penang and Singapore served as bases for Chinese and Indian pro-democracy activists from the People's Action Party, such as Lee Kuan Yew and Praban Jarasinghan, which advocated the destruction of the racial quota system and the establishment of a real democracy. Although Malays had significantly higher birthrates than non-Malays -- by 1990, in fact, Malaya would have gained a Malay majority of population -- Malay nationalists and traditional rulers were still afraid of a non-Malay takeover, as was neighbouring Indonesia. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution in contemporary China even made some Malays begin to consider the possibility of Indonesian annexation in a positive light, so long as Malaya would be spared Communism.

In 1970, Malaya had a total population of 11 million people. Of these, 4.5 million were Malays, another four million were Chinese, and the remaining 2.5 million were Indians. When the Malayan federal government announced, in early September, the imposition of new racial quotas on all of the states -- including the non-Malay-majority states of west Malaya -- Chinese and Indian mobs rioted against the federal government. Malayan army soldiers sent in to suppress the uprisings were attacked, and plans were made by Lee Kuan Yew and his counterparts to divide Malaya into Malay-majority and non-Malay-majority countries.

Unfortunately, on the 1st of January, 1971, the Indonesian army invaded Malaya. The Malayan armed forces did not fight against the invaders; in fact, in many cases, it helped the Indonesians overcome Chinese and Indian armed resistance. After Malay politicians had been brought together into a Constituent Assembly, supported by the traditional monarchs, and voted for annexation into Indonesia, the entire country was annexed on the 19th of February. Post-annexation Malaya was marked by the massacre of a half-million Chinese and one hundred thousand Indians, including all those people with known PAP connections who hadn't escaped ahead of time.

The League of Nations and the Indian government condemned the Indonesian invasion and annexation of Malaya, and the subsequent massacres of non-Malays. Almost a million Malayan Chinese fled north into southern Thailand, where these skilled and well-trained refugees were eventually absorbed as permanent residents. Although Muslim Indians were subjected to less persecution than either Chinese or Hindu Indians, Muslim Indians were just as well represented in the post-1971 diaspora of Malayan Indians as their Hindu counterparts, with almost a quarter-million emigrating, most to Britain, Australia, and Trinidad. For Indonesia, the League of Nations' condemnation of its invasion and massacres led to its withdrawal from that bloc and its later alliances with its neighbours and the United States, laying the framework for the Southeast Asian alliance system that precipitated the Third World War.

For the modern generation of Indians in the diaspora, the sufferings of the Malayan Indians stand out as a singular example of how a sufficiently determined and hostile government can make their lives very difficult.