Opinion Raising hopes

At the urging of former Tory defence minister Sir Nicholas Soames, the British army appears to be re-examining an old proposal to raise a Sikh regiment like the one the British Indian army bequeathed to the Indian army when it beat the retreat in 1947. The proposal for such a unit surfaced last in 2007, but was shelved for fear that in modern Britain, segregation by community may seem racist. Now, Sir Nicholas has urged the army to “do away with political correctness” and, rather, celebrate the exploits of Sikhs under British colours. Indeed, it was an extraordinary career, ranging from the mid-19th century to World War II, almost a century later.

Time and space have a lot of say in defining what is political, and what is correct. The consensus among historians suggests that in imperial times, the British Indian army did not find it hard to justify taxonomic absurdities like the martial races theory, where communities which stood with it through the difficulties of 1857 were declared to be reliably brave, while the rest — and those who spearheaded the rising in particular — were dismissed as either neurasthenically seditious or plain useless. Similarly, there was no anxiety in London about exploiting Indians’ uneasiness about commensality by dividing the army into units which were ethnically defined. Any policy that drove wedges between the soldiery would preclude concerted risings, and was therefore welcome.

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Today, in multicultural Britain, where nationality is the only legitimate flag of identity, raising troops by ethnicity seems dreadfully quaint. But then, the general election is just months away and David Cameron is visibly struggling to do anything earth-shaking with the ethnic minority vote. At this point, reviving a plan focused on a prominent immigrant community could be convenient politics.