mijhar formal name for a monk

namasté Nepali greeting, made with joined hands in front of the lower face

S/sarkar government, officialdom word used to address or to refer to royalty

shikar game

shikari hunter

tagra rahau may you remain strong

ustad ‘teacher’, non-commissioned officer

Note: the ‘-bahadur’ at the end of names is often shorted to ‘-é’ when talking, so, instead of Kulbahadur, it is Kulé etc

Russian

I thank Prof. em Dr. George van Driem for his unstinted help in the vocabulary used in the narrative.

aktivnyye meropriyatiya active measures

gazvedka intelligence-gathering

maskirovka deception

Rodina motherland, Mother Russia

vlasti the elite

vnezapnost surprise

General

cane bamboo Aurindibaria falcata

Map of Malayan Peninsula

Map of Malayan Peninsula

Map of Malayan Railway

Map of Malayan Railway

Preface

It has happened times without number, most likely unknown at the time by those involved the most. Some put it that ‘history turns on a very small point’; others, less careful in expressing themselves, ask whether it was God’s law or sod’s law? However described, ‘it happens’. In the story I have written for you, disguised as it is to save reputations and to keep law suits off me, I tell how one night in August 1951 during the 10-year-long Malayan Emergency, a senior, highly experienced British major commanding a rifle company of Gurkhas, went to bed with ‘too much on board’. This was not the first or last time that such was the case. However, on the night in question he was woken up in the small hours by an excited Special Branch officer’s phone call – the line was not a clear one – to be told that a large party of guerrillas was at such-and-such a place. ‘I recommend you move now,’ the excited man said after passing the six-figure grid reference.

In his haze the Major wrote the last two figures in the wrong order so went where he had not been directed. Dame Fortune, that ever fickle lady, also decreed that the Special Branch officer’s information was out-of-date when he phoned and that by then the guerrillas had moved quite some way away. Against millions of odds, the two parties met up and the guerrillas suffered their greatest loss ever during the Emergency.

As the Major was a friend of the author’s he shall remain nameless.^[1]

If, Gentle Reader, that intrigues you, please read on to learn what actually happened and how that one isolated incident became the ‘tipping point’ of the Malayan Emergency in favour of the Security Forces. Fully to appreciate the significance and the irony of that one incident, background events in Moscow, Darjeeling, Delhi and Calcutta must first be brought to your notice.

Your humble author.

The official version of the incident is on pages 31 to 41 in the History of the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gookhas (The Sirmoor Rifles) Volume IV, 1948-1994. ↵

1

Tuesday 4 October 1946, The Old Arsenal Building, The Kremlin, Moscow: ‘You have done well, Comrade Colonel General. I want our revolutionary struggle in Asia to prevail before that Mao Tse-tung wins the civil war in China, which I believe he surely will. Your suggestion has many merits. Once we have Politburo approval you will put your plan into action.’

The man known to the world as Stalin, ‘Steel’, the Secretary General and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, the homicidal and illegitimate son of a Georgian shoemaker, was probably unaware that Mao’s spokesman, Lu Dingyi, had, nine months earlier, already produced his own theory and plan for similar action. Had Stalin – arch-realist, brutal and unpredictable despot, psychologically warped and capable of much evil – known that, his praise might not have been so warm as he looked up, eyes hooded, at the man standing in front of him whose son, Juri, would marry his daughter Svetlana Allilueva as her second husband. He was clearly pleased with his protégé, who should never be, nor was, allowed to become too strong.

‘Thank you, Comrade Secretary General. Your words mean a great deal to me and, indeed, I feel that my offering can only do the Party much good,’ answered Colonel General Andrei A Zhdanov,  the younger by twenty years, trying, not very successfully, to hide his obvious pleasure.^[1] It was never wise to show anything that might be taken as exuberance in front of the Secretary General, especially when his dark, cruel eyes – eyes that hooded as he spoke and seemed to know too much and to see farther than the line of vision permitted. ‘My life’s work is for Cause and Country,’ he said, adding, for good measure, ‘under the creative genius of your leadership.’

That merely drew a shrug: it was to be expected. His peers recognised that the Secretary General was a man out of proportion, his cunning, his conceit, his strength and his dreams – all were larger than life, exacerbated by megalomania. He was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms; patience and guile hiding his vainglory so successfully that many took him for normal.

Zhdanov, now the Party’s ideologue and theorist, had become a candidate member of the Central Committee in 1930 at the unusually young age of thirty-four and a full member of the Politburo in 1939. To be a political Colonel General was a rarity and reflected his great potential. Of medium height, his hairline had receded. His round face, with its small nose and wide-set eyes, belied his inner toughness. His tight lips under his clipped moustache and a protruding chin showed a firmness of character and his still lithe body reflected a strapping youth. In fact, he was as tough as any, more dedicated than most and as hard an exponent of the Stalinist line in all matters as there could be.

The members of the Politburo, sitting either side of a long, heavy, oak table, looked on with tolerance at the praise, so seldom given, now being bestowed on this potentially all-powerful individual who wore his authority with a bland good will that masked a subtle intelligence and dominating resolve. Older Politburo members, whose ideology had been the tiniest bit suspect or who had opinions of their own, had long vanished, shot in the head in the Lefortovo jail, bodies disposed of, leaving bereft families suffering hardships by being ‘tainted’, so under lifetime suspicion.

That left clever, fawning toadies to rise to senior level. Zhdanov’s potential was, however, a cause for Stalin’s jealousy – no one at that meeting would have guessed that he would die under mysterious and unexplained circumstances the following year.

‘Comrade Zhdanov, before the other Comrades open the folder in front of them and a full discussion starts on what you have prepared, I want you to tell us, in outline, what your new policy recommendation is and why you have made it.’

With a dismissive nod of his head, Stalin indicated the empty chair at the end of the table. Zhdanov took his seat and addressed the meeting, first taking some notes out of his briefcase.

With his face lit by a fleeting smile, the Colonel General said, ‘Comrades, the world is divided into two camps: the anti-democratic, imperialist camp on the one hand and the anti-imperialist, democratic camp on the other. My proposed doctrine is purely anti-imperialistic in concept. It adds a dimension to our struggle as world liberators of the oppressed. The Great Patriotic War, which we won virtually single-handed at such a cost in blood and treasure, left the imperialist nations in ruins after their initial defeat in the case of France and Holland (Belgium doesn’t count), or seriously weakened and floundering in debt, in the case of Great Britain. Look how our clever propaganda managed to persuade British voters to discard that drunken and arrogant Churchill in his fumbling twilight, even though he had been Prime Minister for most of the war, and elect a socialist government with many members sympathetic to our Cause and our beloved motherland, our Rodina.’

His listeners, seated in thick leather-covered chairs, nodded their approval. Indeed, the tempestuous traumas and sulks of their Chairman that made life so difficult and dangerous for them were unknown about in Britain where a popular ‘Uncle Joe’ was how the public saw him. It had made his long-term planning immeasurably easier.

Overseeing them at the far end of the room was a full-length portrait of Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, ‘Lenin’, the revolutionary saint of Soviet Communism, his domed forehead thrown back as though in a fresh breeze, his piercing eyes looking towards the glorious future which his stern face confidently proclaimed and which Marxism-Leninism called an historic inevitability.

‘Our fundamental aim,’ the Colonel General continued, ‘is to ensure that all colonies, starting in Asia rather than in Africa, have anti-imperialist comrades running them after ejecting the current imperialist, colonial governments, by stealth or force. Our chief targets are Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya and Singapore, and finally Hong Kong. The “tipping point” for the first two will be sooner than for the others. After that the remainder should fall into our hands like ripe plums.’

‘How long do you reckon before all this happens?’ someone asked.

‘Comrade, that is difficult to say. My guess is four to five years without our assistance. Shorter with it.’ That vague answer seemed to satisfy.

The Minister in charge of munitions, cracking the joints of his fingers, tritely observed ‘Surely you don’t envisage any overt aid, do you? I have some stock not used during the war but I feel it will be safer to have it nearer to hand.’

He glanced at Stalin who did not even bother to look at him or to take his pipe out of the sunken crack of a mouth that his walrus moustache half-concealed.

‘No certainly not. I believe that no overt help and no surplus wartime stocks are necessary, certainly not to start with anyway. There are more than enough weapons already in the hands of those natives who fought against the feudalist Japanese.’

The knuckle-cracker looked relieved. Zhdanov continued, ‘before I show you on the map where the places I am talking about are, I want to emphasise why I have also said “no physical presence”. Over the years our Party has managed to get a firm footing among the imperialists’ colonies. As an example from India I mention one Mr Vikas Bugga who is a linchpin for our work there. This quaintly named Indian, a Captain in the Disinformation Department of the First Chief Directorate of the International Department of the Central Committee, is fully trained in aktivnyye meropriyatiya, active measures, run, of course, by the Ministry of State Security, the MGB.’

Stalin butted in. ‘Comrade Zhdanov will not mind if I say that speed is of the essence. I want this done before those yellow monsters, the slit-eyed Chinese, try to get comrades with their way of thinking into power.’