Communalism and Communism in Malaya

THE nation-building programmes of those Asian countries which have recently freed themselves from colonial control are challenged today by two main disruptive forces, communalism and communism. The claims of dissatisfied racial, religious or linguistic minorities still seriously impede the political unification of countries like India, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia. In all of these countries the disunity caused by conflicts between communal or national groups offers favourable opportunities for the spread of communism, since communal grievances are rarely free from social and economic implications. With its specious claims to resolve the national problem by the destruction of the class basis of society, communism, as in Eastern Europe, hopes to find a useful hunting ground in those Asian countries that are afflicted by internal group conflicts. It is significant that the communists in India, Burma and Ceylon have been quick to support separatist and minority movements. But the one country in South Asia today in which the interaction between communalism and communism is proving most disastrous is Malaya. It is the formidable combination of these two challenges to unity within a single small dependent territory that gives the Malayan problem its truly baffling complexity. Communalism is the inescapable legacy of European colonial rule, a symptom both of decaying empires and of the birth pangs of new states. For a comparatively brief period in the histories of Asia and Africa, European colonial administrations acted as a temporary cement, holding fast in racial mosaics the medlies of tribes and nationalities brought together to serve the needs of tropical colonisation. But cultures comparable to those of the homogeneous societies of the West could not arise in the Asian and African colonies simply as a result of fifty to a hundred years of subjection to a common colonial government. Though Western technology, economic organisation, administration, law and language undoubtedly set unifying forces in motion

Communalism · Communism · Political science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Asian Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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