Sikhs and Other Indians Fought Heroically For Britain in Two World Wars.

Richard Mellor

The movie clip above is not connected to the commentary below from Andy Singh Baines. I added it to give some idea of the important role the Indian people, and all the colonised people played in WW1 and WW2 fighting for the British. Nigerians and other colonial people were a huge section of the British armed forces, this is so of the Irish as Ireland was England and then Britain's first colony before British capitalism colonised India, or parts of Africa. 

Laurence Fox, the right wing racist British actor had made disparaging remarks about a Sikh soldier appearing in the movie 1917, claiming it was "forced diversity." One can imagine the insult this is to Indians and the Sikh population in general. Having grown up in a military family and in the UK after Myanmar and Nigeria, I would not have known of the contribution Indians played in fighting for Britain against the Nazi's and Japanese Imperialism. My father, though a conservative, talked often of the heroism of these people especially the Gurkhas.

The right wing forces in the UK that are attacking immigrants and siding with Neo-fascists and white supremacists are being looked to by many English people who are completely unaware that their safety and freedom as members of a parliamentary democracy was defended by immigrants or their parents who are being vilified in the UK today.

I am very much in agreement with Andy Singh Baines' comments below.

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Andy Singh Bains

 

During World War One, over 65,000 Sikhs served in the British Indian Army, comprising 22% of its forces despite only being 2% of India’s population. During World War Two, over 300,000 Sikhs served in that same army. Together, over 83,000 Sikhs died in both wars. 

These facts are being used by Sikh politicians in Britain right now to critique the rhetoric of the far-right and to console racist and backward sections of the population by showing that Sikhs are “loyal citizens” that can be trusted and that many of them “sacrificed their lives for democracy in Britain.” 

In reality, these two wars were fought not for “democracy” - as Lenin showed, democracy under capitalism has always been, like in ancient Athens, simply democracy for the slave-owners - but instead, these wars were fought for the selfish interests of the British Empire, and thousands of Sikhs, alongside thousands of other Indians, were just seen and used as cannon-fodder for imperialism. After all, how could they have been fighting for “democracy” when Indians were being denied their basic democratic rights and India remained a colony of Britain tied in shackles? 

As an aside, this simple fact was even lost by the Communist Party of India which, under orders from Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, discouraged Indians from struggling against the British because it “disrupted the war effort against fascism.” As a consequence, the Communists, who had grown very popular among the masses for their heroism in the previous period, during the 1920s and 1930s, now became sidelined from them. 

Meanwhile, the native bourgeoisie, wrapping itself in the cloak of Gandhi who gave the famous “Do or Die” speech which sparked the Quit India movement (1942-45) or what the Governor-General of India referred to as “by far the most serious rebellion since 1857,” took firm control over the political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle. In 1946, the mutiny of 10,000 sailors in the Indian navy, which was spreading to other sections of the army and which sparked solidarity strikes and riots throughout the subcontinent, from Mumbai to all the way in Karachi, was heading in the direction of a national liberation war for independence against the British. 

The leaders of Congress Party and Muslim League, however, condemned the uprising, seeing it as detrimental to a negotiated settlement with the British, which would ensure a safe transfer of power from the imperialists to the native bourgeoisie. With the road to revolution blocked, the pendulum swung toward counter-revolution: the partition of the country, and the bloody communal violence that accompanied it and left millions dead.

Returning to earlier, the only way to ensure the safety of migrants and fight the far-right is through the unity and revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism, a system which breeds racism to divide and disorient the common people and turn their attention away from the real cause for worsening living standards. The problem is not that people coming into the country, looking for a better life, are exhausting already limited resources. There are more than enough resources to go around. The problem is that the capitalist class, the millionaires and billionaires, are hoarding most of it. The problem is a system which puts the interests of a few ahead of the collective interests of humanity as a whole.