1947 : Karenni States politics

British India was administered through a dual system of provinces and Princely States, spanning from Balochistan to the southernmost tip of the Madras Presidency, and from Bengal to Bombay. On historical political maps, British provinces are typically marked in shades of red, while the native states appear in yellow or chrome. However, during the period between 1824 and 1937—when Burma was annexed to mainland India—a small native territory existed that juggled various administrative possibilities, including the potential of remaining a separate sovereign nation. This was known as the Karenni States (often marked simply as "Karen Tribes" on maps and known today as Kayah State). While members of the Indian National Congress rarely involved themselves in Burmese politics, the pivotal year of 1947 inextricably connected Burma, India, and the Karenni States.

In August 1947, British India was partitioned into the independent Unions of India and Pakistan. Amidst the ongoing upheaval of partition, its former province, Burma, adopted its own constitution just a month later, in September 1947. At that time, Burma was organized into the following administrative units:

1. Sagaing
2. Shan States
3. Wa States
4. Magwe
5. Arakan
6. Mandalay
7. Pegu
8. Irrawaddy
9. Tenasserim

The Karenni (or Karen) tribes were historically administered under the Shan States, serving as a complex administrative unit that vacillated between British protection and sovereign independence. Prior to the 19th century, these tribes were loosely governed under Burmese suzerainty as an autonomous territory. While the annexation of Lower Burma between 1824 and 1852 left the Karenni largely unaffected, Burmese supremacy began to wane. By 1852, the region faced increasing British interference, rendering Karenni independence precarious. Caught between two rival powers, the Karenni leaders sought protectorate status from the British; however, the British—having already exhausted significant resources on Lower Burma—were reluctant to establish a new protectorate in the heart of the Indochinese peninsula. Consequently, between 1852 and 1875, the Karenni remained in a state of geopolitical ambiguity, caught between British influence and Burmese expansion.

In 1875, within the newly founded capital of Mandalay, the British administrator Sir Thomas Douglas Forsyth signed a treaty with King Mindon of the Konbaung Dynasty. This agreement formally recognised the Karenni States as independent from both Burma and Britain. This sovereign status created persistent friction between the Konbaungs and the British. It was not until 1892—after both Upper and Lower Burma had been incorporated into British India—that the British reclassified the Karenni States as "feudatory states," a status distinct from the Indian Princely States. A British agent was stationed in Loikaw, and the states of Bawlake, Kantarawaddy, and Kyebogyi agreed to accept a British stipend.

In the early 20th century, administration shifted again as the Karenni States were placed under the Federated Shan States. While legal documents had previously been drafted through the Legislative Council of India due to the region's proximity to Calcutta, the relocation of the capital to Delhi caused a shift in administrative priority. During the early 1900s, the Delhi government was increasingly preoccupied with the Indian independence movement, which largely excluded Burmese politics. Paradoxically, while Burma had been administered as part of British India for strategic reasons, it had historically functioned as a separate entity.

The eventual separation of Burma from India in 1937 drew criticism from Indian leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. At the 1936 Faizpur session of the Indian National Congress, Nehru denounced the move as a "divide and rule" tactic intended to weaken the independence movements in both regions. Despite the separation, the status of the Karenni States remained unchanged until the chaos of World War II. While the Japanese occupied Burma and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army marched along the Karenni periphery in 1942, the region itself remained largely sidelined during the conflict.

Following the war, as British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Aung San—the architect of Burmese independence—began campaigning for the integration of the Karenni into a unified Burma. Much like the integration of Princely States occurring simultaneously in India and Pakistan, the Karenni States were eventually absorbed. Following Burma's independence in 1948, these territories became a constituent unit of the new Union of Burma.

The Irish mutiny at Jalandhar, 1920

The Connaught Rangers were an Irish Catholic regiment of the British Army, formed in 1881 by amalgamating the 88th and 94th Regiments of Foot. Its home depot was at Renmore Barracks in Galway and it recruited mainly in the province of Connacht. These were men from Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Clare and Westmeath — the western and midland counties that became the Irish Free State. The regiment's nickname was "The Devil's Own", and it has the most oddest of Indian connections.

The Jalandhar Cantonment (or Jullunder Cantonment) is one of the oldest cantonments in India, established in 1848 after the first Anglo-Sikh War. In 1920 the cantonment was the scene of mutiny by Irish soldiers who were protesting against martial law in Ireland by refusing to obey orders. They took down the Union Flag and replaced it with the flag of the Irish Republic proclaimed in Dublin. This is the only entry in the cantonment's own official history that connects Jalandhar (and thus, India) to Ireland. The cantonment sits on the Grand Trunk Road, 89 kilometres from Amritsar and 371 kilometres from Delhi. Jullundur — as Jalandhar was then spelled — was therefore less than 90 kilometres from the site of the Amritsar massacre of April 1919. The soldiers who mutinied were stationed in the immediate shadow of that event, in a Punjab still seething with anger.

The morning of Sunday 28 June 1920; Wellington Barracks, Jullundur. At eight in the morning, Joseph Hawes, Patrick Gogarty, Christopher Sweeney and Stephen Lally, all members of C Company, approached an officer they felt they could trust, Lance Corporal John Flannery, and told him that they wished to ground arms and cease fighting for the British Army due to the oppression of their friends in Ireland. Hawes was from Kilrush, County Clare. He had been home on leave in October 1919 and had personally witnessed British soldiers with bayonets drawn preventing a hurling match from taking place. Letters from home describing Black and Tan violence had been arriving at the barracks, which A hastily recruited British paramilitary force that became synonymous with colonial terror in Ireland during the War of Independence. 

By the following morning over three hundred soldiers had joined the protest. The mutineers doubled the guard, distributed the task of making regular patrols, placed a permanent guard to monitor the senior officers, put a guard on alcohol, and commissioned a hundred green, white and orange rosettes from the local bazaar. They replaced the Union Jack with an Irish tricolour, declared their barracks Liberty Hall — the name of the Dublin building where the 1916 Rising had been planned — and sang rebel songs. The mutineers captured the cantonment armoury, took their English officers hostage and declared the Jalandhar cantonment the seat of the "Free Irish Government in exile." A clamp of secrecy descended on Jalandhar such that no details about what was happening inside the cantonment could leak out. For the next fifty years the world would remain largely oblivious of those events. All the Indian soldiers were moved away from Jalandhar, a tight censorship descended on the town, and it was officially stated that a major secret war exercise was under way in the cantonment. The British mobilised two battalions — the South Wales Borderers and the Seaforth Highlanders — who arrived with artillery and machine guns.

James Joseph Daly

On 30 June, Frank Geraghty of Castleblayney, County Monaghan, and Patrick Kelly were detailed to travel to Solon (Solan, in Himachal Pradesh of today) in the Simla Hills to communicate the fact that the troops in Jullundur had mutinied and to give instructions that if they mutinied, it would be on the lines of passive resistance with no violence. Geraghty appealed to James Joseph Daly as the most competent man and the one he knew personally wished to carry out a mutiny. Daly was a 20-year-old private from Ballymoe, County Galway. He had joined the Connaught Rangers in April 1919 — while the War of Independence was already underway — and been posted to India. His brother William had been one of the original mutineers at Jullundur. When Geraghty and Kelly were arrested on arrival at Solon, Daly heard enough of their shouted messages through the guardroom bars to understand what had happened.

Dagshai Prison, Solan

That night Daly rallied forty men. The Catholic chaplain at Solon, Father Benjamin Baker, persuaded the mutineers to deposit their weapons in the magazine for safekeeping. Then Daly changed his mind. A party of men led by Daly made an attempt to recover their arms and in the engagement two of them, Patrick Smythe and Peter Sears, were killed. Peter Sears had not even been involved in the attack on the magazine — he was returning to his billet when hit by a stray bullet. Eighty-eight mutineers were court-martialled: seventy-seven were sentenced to imprisonment and ten were acquitted. James Daly was shot by a firing squad at Dagshai Prison (today, the Dagshai Jail Museum, in Solan) on 2 November 1920. He was the last member of the British Armed Forces to be executed for mutiny. Eighteen others had also been sentenced to death. All eighteen had their sentences commuted. Only Daly was shot — specifically, as the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford stated, because the British could not afford to show leniency toward a mutineer in the Punjab while trying to maintain discipline over Indian troops still inflamed by Amritsar. Three memorabilia are associated with James Daly: the Connaught Rangers medal, a cross, and a frayed prayer book containing pages with Daly's fingerprints smeared in blood, indicating he was clutching the book when he was shot dead.

The guardroom at the
Jullunder Barracks
(Wellington Barracks)

The guardroom today, where the mutiny of the Irishmen in the British army is still remembered in India, stands at the site. The cantonment remains an active Indian Army establishment. The mutiny is noted in the cantonment's own official history, making Jalandhar one of the few places in India where an Irish event is formally acknowledged in local institutional memory. The Fateh newspaper of Delhi praised the Jullundur mutineers' actions as an adoption of Mahatma Gandhi's principles of civil disobedience and an illustration of how patriotic people can preserve their honour, defy the orders of the Government, and defeat its unjust aims. 

The bodies of Daly, Smythe and Sears remained in India for fifty years. In 1923, following Irish independence, the imprisoned mutineers were released and returned to Ireland. In 1936, the Free State's Fianna Fáil government awarded pensions to those whose British Army pensions were forfeited by conviction. In 1970, the bodies of Daly, Sears and Smythe were repatriated from India to Ireland for reburial. Daly was reinterred in Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath. A memorial to the mutineers stands in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.