Burma’s Constitution

Book excerpt: This is an attempt to study and interpret the Constitution of the Union of Burma which has now passed its tenth year. A constitution read outside the context of constitutional history is incomplete, and I have, therefore, tried to trace the developments which culminated in the constitution; then study its important features with reference, where necessary, to the background in which they took shape and form; and, while studying how the constitution has been working, touch lightly on contemporary events and trends. It is a vast canvas I am trying to cover and what I am able to draw on it would inevitably be sketchy. But I do not write as a historian whose focus is on detail in a narrow area. Rather, having dug and gathered the facts, I trace their sweep in history. The details I willingly and happily leave to the historians, hoping only that my study will be of some use to them, if only as a target for their learned criticism. Some of the events and people I describe are still too near, and a clear perspective is therefore difficult. What is nearest appears biggest, and I often find it tempting to see and accept that Burma's history as a new independent nation began with the students' strike of 1936 or the resistance movement during the Second World War.