‘Two-tier system for Indians’

DR GEORGE HAY is the official historian of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and author of the report of the special committee to review historical inequalities in commemoration.

“The record keeping in the Indian army doesn’t appear to have been very good.

“They built the Neuve-Chapelle Memorial (in France). And we believe that it is representative. And it isn’t missing any names. So that’s definitely one category where it seems to have worked.

“What you then see across Africa, and particularly the Middle East, is another issue, bound up in decisions taken with the British Indian administration.

“Because these cemeteries and memorials are outside of Europe, they did not believe that the families of Indians will visit them.

“When it comes to Indian casualties, there is this two-tier system. If those men died in Europe, they would be treated in the same way or in accordance with their faith as everyone else. But if they died outside of Europe, principally if they died in Africa and in Mesopotamia, they are effectively treated almost as missing.

“So, memorials in Mesopotamia will have British officers and any Indian officers named. And then Indian NCOs and soldiers would be a number – say, 300 of a given regiment were killed.

“Over the last couple of decades, the commission has corrected almost all of those issues across Africa and the Middle East.

“In Basra, the one outstanding memorial hasn’t yet been corrected, which we know to have somewhere in the region of 30,000 (Indian) names attributed to it. Obviously, for reasons connected to security, we haven’t been able to get in and do anything to that one.

“In the case of Amara, we have 5,000 unidentified Indian burials. There were a number of hospitals. So Indian casualties who were coming back down the line from fighting subsequently died in those hospitals and were then buried in that plot.

“And the military authorities did not effectively mark their graves in a way that we can identify who those individuals are. Those men are then seen as missing.

“You have a relatively senior Indian officer who travels to Mesopotamia and is attached to the command there. There is no fuel to undertake cremation (of Hindu and Sikh soldiers). And so this is one of the reasons that is later claimed, that you make all these men missing.

“Everyone forward of Basra has been buried, and their graves haven’t been appropriately marked. This is the Indian Army that makes this decision. They say, ‘If we make them all missing, then we don’t have to deal with that particular problem (of identifying the graves later)’.

“So, what that leads to are grave registration units, which are another bit of the army effectively being told not to recover Indian dead in Mesopotamia and to focus almost entirely on the recovery of European dead.

“And, therefore, that’s why Indian missing statistics for Mesopotamia are so high.

“In most cases, their graves are entirely lost by the end of the war.”