Myanmar under the Revolutionary Council (RC) that came to power through a coup d'etat on 2 March 1962 underwent a political and economic transformation. The parliamentary regime was replaced by a military junta, which abolished the Constitution and ruled by decree, removing all vestiges of the ancien regime. The populace was completely depoliticized and socialist revolution became the vanguard of state ideology. The mixed economy comprising a nascent private sector and a shrinking state sector was replaced by a state-controlled autarkic economy that stressed self-reliance and equity.

RESTRUCTURING STATE AND SOCIETY

Both the RC, which was the supreme authority, and the Revolutionary Government (RG) of senior military officers were chaired by General Ne Win, the idiosyncratic chief of the armed forces. The RG instituted a hierarchy of Security and Administrative Committees (SACs) to replace the civil service. The SACs’ principal function seems “to have been to check on local initiatives and to ensure that central directives were followed”.

The RC announced its ideology known as the Myanma Hsoshelit Lanzin or the Burmese Way to Socialism (BWS), on 30 April 1962. The BWS, inspired by the socialist tradition of pre-independence nationalists, denounced bureaucracy, repudiated parliamentary democracy, and promised to develop a non-exploitative planned socialist economy as well as a socialist democracy appropriate to Myanmar conditions. Subsequently, the RC formed a cadre party called the Myanma Hsoshelit Lanzin Parti (Burma Socialist Programme Party, or BSPP) in July. This was followed by the publication of the BSPP's world-view in January 1963. Entitled “The System of Correlation of Man and His Environment” (SCME), it was an eclectic mixture of Buddhism and Marxism couched in general terms susceptible to a variety of interpretations.