Do you know who killed your Resettlement Officer?
Do you know who is helping the bandits in Todak?

Meanwhile propaganda officials came to Todak, to study new measures of psychological warfare; the school and the communal hall began building out of funds provided by the Malayan Chinese Association; Todak was now a priority project: money, experts, social welfare, and Red Cross aid came in. There was talk of a cinema hall, and on the square a loudspeaker was installed, to relay music for the relaxation of the people of Todak.

The battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Todak
was on.

Meanwhile Luke Davis and Bob Stewart had collected in large sealed boxes the questionnaires, and went over them, one by one, with police interpreters at their elbow, ready to translate. But there was nothing to translate.

‘Bloody, bloody nuisance that man was, alive or dead,’ said Luke, exhausted, throwing the last of the two thousand blank questionnaires, still blank, on the floor.

And Bob Stewart couldn’t agree more.

9

A REGION ALL OF STONE

In a Malaya promised independence Sir Moksa Bakrar was one of the self-asserted leaders, acceptable to Authority, who formed and deformed parties at the bat of an eyelid.

Most parties owned two things in common: nebulousness of economic programme; and assertion that all would be well if the people trusted them and their aim, which was inevitably: independence and self-government, or self-government and then independence. Endless discussion as to what these words meant ensued.

There was, also, opportunity for violent inter-party quarrel concerning the number of years before independence (or self-government) could be safely achieved.

The boldest of the parties (owning the thickest files in police records) were unwilling to endure more than a year or two, at the utmost five, of protection against the fearful evils to which free nations are prone.

The best-beloved of Authority (its leaders wealthy Chinese or Indian businessmen, Malay officials of standing in the aristocratic bureaucracy of the Civil Service) asserted that they were incapable of managing their own affairs for the next twenty.

Sir Moksa Bakrar, President of pip, compromised with fifteen, and knew himself bold, planted on the narrow and ill-defined ledge of Opposition to Colonialism, which now overhung precariously the yawning pit of subversion. Subversion was such an elastic word; it was getting more difficult to know where a legitimate demand ended, and subversion began … but fifteen years stood on the margin of safety, bold, bold, but not too bold.