Indian heroes of the great war deserve their due

Last Sunday morning, November 11, I made my way to the historic and magnificent “Afghan Church”, just five-minute drive from my Mumbai home. There, a beautiful and moving ceremony took place to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The city’s diplomatic corps, led by the British Deputy High Commissioner, along with Indian Army, Air Force and Naval officers, were in attendance. Wreaths were laid in memory of those who had sacrificed their lives in the war.

That war was, of course, a victory for the Allied Forces, which included the Great Britain and its colonies, the main colony being India, i.e., present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But there was irony in the choice of the “Afghan Church” (the official name of which is the Church of St John the Evangelist). This church was actually built in memory of one of the worst and most humiliating defeats suffered by the British in modern times, namely the Anglo-Afghan war of 1842. Almost 5,000 British and Indian troops that had been sent to Kabul to subdue and control Afghanistan were completely annihilated by the Afghans, while they were retreating from Kabul. Just three soldiers returned from the rout. There is a famous painting of one of those soldiers, bloodied and almost falling from his horse. The Afghans, in effect, were sending a message to the British: “Don’t mess with us and don’t make the mistake of ever coming back again.”

But the British did, with equally disastrous results, as did the Russians over a century later when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. They, too, tasted defeat, which was one of the causes leading to the eventual break-up of the Soviet Union. Be that as it may, what @BrainyQuote really interests me is the role of the Indian soldiers in the First World War, a contribution that has not been sufficiently recognised and appreciated. Here, let me indulge myself on a personal note.

My maternal grand uncle, Hardit Singh Malik, was one of the unsung heroes of that war. He was a student at Oxford University’s Balliol College when the war broke out. His English classmates enlisted but when he also tried to do so, the British War Office, turned him down, clearly on racial grounds. So, he turned to the French, and was taken into the French Red Cross, and served on the battlefront. Still keen to play a more active role and fascinated by airplanes, he applied to join the Royal Flying Corps, which had only then been formed and would become the Royal Air Force. There, too, he was rejected. So, he asked the French if he could enlist in their air force. They agreed. When his Balliol College tutor learnt about this, he was so outraged that he wrote to Major General Henderson in the War Office. An embarrassed War Office enlisted Malik as a cadet in the Flying Corps. After some training he went into action, becoming, I believe, India’s first fighter pilot. He shot down a German plane but was wounded and hospitalised. Meanwhile, he had been nicknamed “The Flying Sikh”, much before renowned Indian athlete Milkha Singh got the same nickname! After the war, Malik was selected for the coveted Indian Civil Service and served as India’s first High Commissioner in Canada, and later as India’s Ambassador to France.

Though his courage and tenacity in the war years were recognised, there was obviously much racism in those days. In a recent book, Kishwar Desai shows how a large proportion of the 1.3 million Indians who served in the British army were in fact coerced to join by bribery and force. That must have been true. After all, most of the soldiers were poor and their pay helped to maintain their families. However, most of the Indian soldiers went to war willingly. That was their training. And they covered themselves with glory, winning several Victoria Crosses (the highest award given by the British for gallantry) and serving in virtually all the theatres of war, from Europe to Mesopotamia, to Africa. Around 74,000 Indian soldiers died, hundreds of them in the Battle at Neuve-Chapelle in France (where there is a memorial to them), as well as at Gallipoli, where the opposing forces were Turks, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who would go on to become his country’s charismatic leader and transform Turkey into a modern, progressive nation.

To assuage the Indian troops being sent to battle, the British authorities assured India that it would soon get self-rule. But the promise was not kept. Two decades later, the Second World War broke out, in which the carnage was even greater — 60 million killed, compared to 37 million in World War I. India again sent its troops “to save democracy” against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, even though the Indians themselves had no democracy at home. That would have to wait for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mohamed Ali Jinnah.

India sent its troops “to save democracy” even though the Indians themselves had no democracy at home.

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them.