Templer's template

In its war against Naxal terror, India has much to learn from the unique battle against Malayan guerrillas five decades ago

The Bastar bloodshed brings to mind Ranjit Gupta, the Calcutta (no Kolkata then) police commissioner, telling me that General Sir Gerald Templer, the British army commander who defeated Malaya's communist guerrillas, inspired his strategy of suppressing West Bengal's first generation of Naxalites. "Templer said that if the guerrillas claim to be fish swimming in water, he poisoned the water. I do the same with Naxalites!" Templer also spoke of "hearts and minds", of which more later.

I didn't know then that the seeds of the insurgency that ravaged Malaya for 34 years were sown at what elderly Southeast Asians still call the "Calcutta Conference". The Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence, to give the four-day Moscow-inspired jamboree its full grandiloquent name, was held on February 19-23, 1948, under the auspices of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. But the delegates in the hutments near Calcutta's Dhakuria lakes American troops had used during World War II were hardly youths or students. Attending as a Pakistani, Ashok Mitra, later West Bengal's finance minister, describes a Bengali trade unionist "still in his thirties, therefore qualifying as a 'youth'"! There were Soviet commissars, Australian ideologues, French labour leaders, battle-hardened Vietminh soldiers, British lefties, Pakistani peasants, Yugoslav revolutionaries and Malayan-Chinese guerrillas.

Jolly Mohan Kaul, once high in the CPI's ranks, and his formidable wife, Manikuntala Sen, another former revolutionary, also mention the conference in their memoirs. A B Bardhan and Gita Mukherjee may well have done so too. Radical Bengalis who clung to the myth of Lenin predicting the road to world revolution lay from Peking to Paris via Calcutta welcomed the event and basked in the glory of so many foreigners in their city. They were excited by the outburst of bombs and bullets that killed two participants on the last day. But it says much for the Left's ostrich-like self-absorption that they were impervious to the international ramifications of an event that was preceded by four communist activists travelling through Asia surveying colonial conditions and establishing links with local youth movements.

Historians and the Union government believe it was no accident that three European plantation managers in Malaya were murdered four months later, sparking off the Malayan Emergency. In fact, the Southeast Asian delegates were the torchbearers of revolution. Lee Siong of the Malayan Communist Party returned to Singapore (then in Malaya) too late for the MCP's plenary meeting because he stopped in Rangoon to attend a peasants' congress. But the Australian Communist Party's president, Lawrence Sharkey, attended the plenary where the decision to revolt was taken. Presumably, he conveyed to the MCP the Calcutta Conference's secret recommendation of armed struggle. Insurrections also broke out in India (Telangana), Burma, Indochina, Indonesia and the Philippines. There were additional local reasons for each uprising but the Calcutta gathering, egged on by Vietnam's Le Tam and two militant Yugoslavs, was the common ignition.

In Malaya, meanwhile, Templer wasn't only poisoning the waters. Although his tactics were held up as a model for counter-insurgency, he concentrated militarily on intelligence, which is totally lacking in India's Red Corridor. A sound intelligence system enabled Templer to use strict curfews and tight control of food supplies to flush out guerrillas from rebel strongholds. His famous comment, "The answer [to the uprising] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people", indicates another difference. Aware that rebellion was rooted in decades of deprivation, discrimination and rankling resentment of ethnic and economic grievances overlapping in ideology's explosive cauldron, he demanded that the new Chinese resettlement villages located away from the jungles and beyond the reach of guerrilla indoctrination look inviting. To further gain the "hearts and minds" of the Chinese (500,000 of whom became terrorists), he fought for Malayan citizenship for over 2.6 million residents, including 1.1 million Chinese. He sought "political and social equality of all" Malayans and rewarded surrendering rebels and those who encouraged them to surrender with incentives. For instance, their crops were sprayed with herbicide free of charge.

The situation had dramatically improved by the time Templer left Malaya in 1954. But when Time magazine claimed "the jungle had been stabilised", he exploded "I'll shoot the bastard who says that this emergency is over!" As a military strategist he knew it takes time to win over people. Mahendra Karma's Salwa Judum may have emulated Templer's poisoning-the-water tactic that Gupta admired, but that was only half the battle.