Memoir of R. Balan, Vice-President of the Malayan Communist Party

In the spate of published memoirs of leaders and officials of the Malayan Communist Party that began appearing following the end of their armed struggle in 1989, the voice of R. Balan, the vice-president of the MCP, has been noticeably absent. English-educated and Chinese-speaking R. Balan was the nom-de-guerre in the party of R. Raja Gopal.

During the period 1946–8 Balan was a prominent trade unionist. He had organized workers on rubber estates in Perak and was a representative of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions. In this capacity he helped organize a series of strikes, and the authorities arrested and detained him on 30 May 1948, just before the Emergency Regulations were introduced. In The Communist Insurrection in Malaya. 1948-1960 (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), a semi-official account of the Emergency, Anthony Short describes Balan as an exceptionally skilful and successful trade union organizer who was within six hours of taking to the jungle when he was arrested.

Balan had joined the propaganda unit of the Malayan Communist Party during the Japanese Occupation, editing its Tamil news-sheets and serving as a member of the party’s central committee. After the war, he emerged into prominence as one of three MCP representatives who attended the British Empire Conference of Communist Parties in London in 1947, the other two being Wu Tien Wang and Rashid Mydin. In 1955, while still in detention, he was elected vice-president of the MCP. In 1960, after being held for 12 years, he was released under certain restrictions, one of which was that he should forthwith eschew politics. Since then many friends and scholars had urged Balan to tell his story, in particular to explain what had led him to communism, his experience of the jungle life, his relationships with MCP leaders, and his activities as a labour leader. He began recording his memories in three sessions with me in 1974, but we were unable to complete the project because shortly after those sessions he fell ill and passed away. The truncated manuscript of his memoir then got lost among my papers, and I only found it again recently.