Gurkhas up in arms as Balkans deaths reopen old wounds

RAHUL BEDI reports that the British Government is being accused of discriminating against some loyal soldiers and breaking an old pact.


KATHMANDU - The death of two British Gurkha regiment soldiers while detonating bombs in Kosovo last week has reopened the dispute in Nepal of its soldiers serving under discriminatory conditions in the British Army.

The Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen's Organisation (GAESO) has accused the British Government of contravening an old treaty and deploying Nepalese Gurkha troops in areas of conflict where their country has no quarrel.

Britain denies it has done this.

The association has also accused the British Government of defying the Race Relations Act by paying unequal compensation and pension to Gurkha soldiers who have loyally served its Army for 184 years.

Sergeant Balaram Rai, of the 26th Gurkha Engineer Regiment, was killed with Lieutenant Gareth Evans, a British officer, when a pile of unexploded bombs, dropped by Nato warplanes, exploded while they were examining them before detonating them in a controlled explosion.

Balaram Rai's body is being flown home to Kathmandu this week for a funeral according to Hindu rites.

The British Ministry of Defence said it would pay his 30-year-old widow, Ashanti, 7.5 per cent of what the widow of an equivalent British soldier would receive.

According to reports from London, she will receive an immediate payment of sterling 19,092 ($57,000) and a pension of sterling 939 a year for five years. It will then drop to sterling 771 for the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, about 3000 Gurkhas serving with the British Army, and 26,000 who have retired and are living in Nepal, are pinning their hopes on a case filed against the British Government by a former soldier who is claiming discrimination in pensions paid to them.

Lance-Corporal Hari Thapa claims that during 15 years of service in the British Army he was paid 60p a day compared with the sterling 51 earned by a British soldier of the same rank.

And, after retirement, Thapa said he got sterling 17.50 a month as a pension while the comparable amount paid to a British soldier was at least 15 times higher.

Thapa's case is backed by the Gurkha ex-servicemen's association. Vice-president Krishna Kumar Rai said that in operational matters Gurkha soldiers were treated like their British counterparts, being made to fight wars, but when it came to parity of pensions and gratuity there was discrimination.

Deepak Thapa, a Nepalese journalist whose grandfather and father fought in the First and Second World Wars, said: "For a Gurkha, joining a foreign army is born out of economic compulsion."

The logic that a Gurkha soldier could live cheaply in Nepal and therefore make do with a significantly smaller pension smacked of arrogant racism, he said.

Thapa said about 7000 former Gurkha soldiers were made redundant by the British after years of fighting armed rebels in Malaysia's jungles in the late 1940s and 1950s.

They were paid just 18 months' salary and declared ineligible for a pension as they had not served the requisite period.

"Given the huge disparity in pay between the Gurkhas and British soldiers, the latter got a pittance and have been fighting for recognition ever since," he said. Nepal's depressed economy meant there wa little chance of re-employment.

The British connection with Gurkha soldiers dates back to the early 19th century when Nepal made territorial incursions into colonial India and an expeditionary force was dispatched to curb them.

A series of indeterminate battles followed, in which each side earned the grudging admiration of the other, resulting in a treaty in 1815 under which a British resident was installed in Kathmandu and the British Indian Army began recruiting Gurkha soldiers.

The relationship was strengthened when the Gurkhas remained loyal to the British during the Indian mutiny in 1857 when colonial rule was severely threatened.

After that the legend of the fearless Gurkha warrior with his deathly khukri or massive curved knife, which is never unsheathed without drawing blood, became known to the outside world.

The hardy Gurkhas served admirably in two world wars and 26 Gurkhas won the Victoria Cross during the Second World War.

Under cover of darkness, Gurkha soldiers would crawl behind enemy lines, feel the boot laces of the sentries and if they were not done up British style soundlessly decapitate them with khukris.

German troops were terrified of the Gurkhas and even today few Gurkha battalions in the Indian Army believe in taking prisoners of war.

Under the Joint Partition Committee instituted after Indian independence in 1947, six of 10 Gurkha Rifle regiments remained in the Indian Army while four regiments voted to become soldiers for the British. According to a further agreement between Nepal, India and Britain, all Gurkha troops in the Indian and British Armies were to be paid the same wage and would subsequently receive equal pensions. However, allowances in the British Army were substantially higher, making service there more popular.

But it was only two years ago, after a series of protests, that the British Government raised the Gurkhas' pay to that of other soldiers. However, their pensions remained the same, bound by the 1947 agreement.

In a gesture of magnanimity, the British also permitted the wives and families of around 3000 Gurkha troops to join them in England, something forbidden earlier.

There are about 26,000 retired British Army Gurkhas in Nepal, of whom 19,000 receive pensions of about sterling 25 million a year in total. The remainder were demobilised after the Malay campaign and not eligible for any extended payments.

While a large proportion of pensions to retired Gurkhas are paid through bank accounts or directly to the veterans in several places across Nepal every month, thousands of them receive their money three times a year from a young British officer dispatched on a long trek across the Himalayas, stopping periodically to make payoffs at pre-arranged spots.

Annual pensions of sterling 23 million to about 120,000 retired Indian Army Gurkhas are similarly paid by officers attached to the Indian Army Pension Office at Pokhra, about 240km west of Kathmandu.

There are seven Gurkha regiments in the Indian Army, totalling 50,000 soldiers and yearly recruitment averages around 2500.

British recruitment was cut more than half to around 230 a year and recruitment centres at Paglihawa in the west and Dharan in the east were closed. This reduced employment opportunities even further for a people who know little other than soldiering in foreign lands.