ABSTRACT
Introduction On 2, March 1962, the Burmese military staged a coup d’état, ending civilian rule. Calling itself the Revolutionary Council (RC), the military moved swiftly to change the date of Peasants’ Day from 1 January to 2 March in order to honor the Burmese peasantry on the anniversary of the military’s seizure of power and to stress the common interests of the army and Burmese farmers. It held a series of seminars and meetings with peasant groups to encourage “open” communication between top-level military officials and peasants, concerning agrarian problems. However, the government’s preoccupation with the "politics of survival," manifested in its tightening control over rural produce and labor, gradually alienated most of the people it once had tried to mobilize for support. This chapter analyzes the relationships between state authorities and Burmese cultivators in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Burma. It establishes the historical context within which contemporary rice farmers have come into contact with local and central authorities. Special emphasis will be placed upon the rationales and strategies different governments have used to promote the agricultural sector, to maximize exaction from the countryside, and to exert control over rural populations. It will also discuss the specific ties the Revolutionary Council attempted to forge with the peasants upon its accession to power, and how these linkages, in some respects, represented a dramatic break with the past, and in others, perpetuated old patterns of state-societal interactions. An outline of the important features of Burmese cultivators’ relationships with state authorities in different periods will help us understand: (1) the historical roots of Burmese cultivators’ different attitudes toward central and local authorities; (2) rice farmers’ concerns with good local leadership and governance structure; (3) the dynamic nature of political legitimacy; and
(4) the varying state-societal interactions that occur under the same political and economic structure, and their different impacts on farmers’ perceptions of different levels of authority.
