Ba Maw

Ba Maw was the first premier of Burma under the constitution of 1937, and the head of the state the Japanese set up in 1943, and he went to prison under the British, the Japanese, the Americans and Ne Win in turn. He was born at Maubin in the delta in 1893, the son of a court official of the last Burmese king who had become a Christian, and was educated at Rangoon, Calcutta, Cambridge and Bordeaux, where he took a doctorate. He made his name as the barrister who defended Saya San, the leader of the peasant rising of 1930, and lost; Saya San was hanged and Ba Maw became the lawyer the nationalists trusted. He entered the legislature, served as education minister, and when the Government of Burma Act separated Burma from India in April 1937 and gave it a cabinet responsible to an elected house, he formed the first one at the head of a coalition his own Sinyetha party, the party of the poor, did not dominate. It fell in February 1939 to U Saw's manoeuvres. He opposed the war, was jailed in 1940 for sedition, and was freed by the Japanese advance in 1942. Tokyo needed a Burmese face and chose his. On 1 August 1943 the occupation declared Burma independent with Ba Maw as Naingandaw Adipadi, head of state, with a cabinet in which Aung San held the army and U Nu foreign affairs; he went to Tokyo in November for the Greater East Asia Conference and spoke of Asia for the Asians while the Japanese army requisitioned rice and men for the Siam railway. When Aung San's army turned in March 1945 he fled with the Japanese, hid in a monastery near Niigata, surrendered in December, and spent seven months in Sugamo prison before the British let him come home in 1946. He formed a party that won nothing. Ne Win jailed him from 1966 to 1968 for his contacts with the rebels, and he wrote the memoir Breakthrough in Burma about it all. He died in Rangoon in May 1977 at eighty-four.

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