They fare badly, being preyed on by insatiable piranhas in their own aboriginal and native lands. The Gurkhas may have chopped Japanese and German heads in twos, but they are victimized by their own Nepali bureaucracy manned by non-Gurkha Bahuns, Chhetris and Newars (BCN). This is clearly illustrated by the following extracts from Lionel Caplan’s book, “Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination.” (Himal Books, 2003, p. 69). Caplan writes:
“British officers who keep track of former soldiers after their return to Nepal have noted such a tendency (“Buying plots of land and building houses beside the road running … from the district capital” – in Ilam, Pokhara, Dharan, Kathmandu and other ex-British Gurkha communities – “thereby situating themselves within easy reach of its administrative offices, schools, banks, hospital and other amenities”) with dismay, although it appears too recent a development to be cited in literature. One officer told me that one of his former orderlies retired at the age of thirty-five years and returned to Phidim, the district capital nearest his village home in Panchthar, in north-east Nepal.”
Caplan’s officer rues: “He does nothing there. It’s awful. He has two houses in Phidim, lives in one, and rents out the other. I don’t think we ever thought that this sort of situation would arise. But if you ask them ‘why don’t you do something for your country?’, they say, ‘what’s the point, sahib, these [high castes] are all corrupt and they will take everything we have.’ ” [my emphasis]
So instead of developing industrious incentives for themselves, British Gurkha retirees and returnees prefer to do nothing to avoid the avaricious government officials on the lookout to fleece them through “ghoosh-pesh” and other crafty maneuvers. Many have preferred to remain where they were last posted, and Britain appeared to be their last permanent sanctuary. Hence began the GAESO’s struggles for the Empire’s pie in the Queen’s Court in London.
Caplan is a Canadian anthropologist, and is therefore evidently free of the usual prejudices inherently nurtured by those British, Nepali, Indian, American, Australian, European and other “visiting scholars” who “study” Nepal.
To be fair, there are many British Gurkha undertakings to be seen in Nepal these days. They have formed security service companies, manpower import agencies, cooperative banking, and run educational institutions; manage FM radio stations, and so on. How have they managed to deal with Nepali red tape, crooked officialdom and its nefarious culture for rip-offs could be a case study.
THE SCOTS COME TO THE GURKHAS’ RESCUE
Nepal’s Gurkhas have largely suffered from the English in Britain. The English-y envoys from Westminster to Kathmandu habitually cite the Tripartite Agreement on the Gurkhas between (the Kingdom of) Nepal, India, and Britain in the old days of 1947. In this, Anglophile “Royal” Nepalese Ambassadors to the Court of St James also have sided with such Englishmen. One Nepali envoy belonging to the Chhetri Basnyat clan even dissuaded the preliminary Gurkha campaign to cease and desist from furthering its cause. In all this, they little realized that the British Divide-and-Rule craft was hastily changed to Divide-and-Run tactics during the drafting of the said three-nation agreement. Above all, the English tea party failed to realize that 1947 was already passé with the two other signatories – Nepal and India – acting mostly unconcerned on the ostensibly shared issue. Moreover, it was already the first decade of the 21st century, and there were these loud cries of universal human rights which smothered all those fickle and cranky charters and treatises.
It was not surprising, therefore, that voluntary public outcries for justice for British Gurkhas were getting louder and more frequent in Britain itself. The latter pages of John Parker’s book, “The Gurkhas: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Feared Soldiers” (Headline Book Publishing, 2000), have British commanding officers openly lamenting and criticizing the myopic policies of the British Government on matters of the then present status and future prospects of the Gurkhas. Their politically incorrect uttering would invite court martial in the olden days; but times had changed for the colonial school of fairness and accountability to be revised and new humane rules to be in place.
So the arrival of Gordon Brown as Britain’s Prime Minister expedited his government’s rapid response to the Gurkha Justice Campaign (GJC). This Scotsman was beset by the issue even in Parliament, but was ably assisted and supported by other Scots in power, such as Duncan-Smith and Jacqui Smith, to resolve the longstanding issue once and for all.
The Scots are per se the Gurkhas of Britain, and are buttressed by the Welsh and Irish who are wont to condemn English stupidity and cruelty and go by the late Irish American writer Frank McCourt’s celebrated diatribe against the English and their 800-year-old subjugation of Ireland. The English have their equivalents in Nepal’s BCN triumvirate, too. So it should be Gordon coming to Kathmandu, and not the aristocratic manor-born Joanna Lumley, who took up the Gurkha cause because her father was rescued by the Gurkha soldier, Tul Bahadur Pun, VC. Joanna, meanwhile, is aspiring to be a Dame on account of her Gurkha cause, but whose old ilk still harks back to the 1947 Tripartite Agreement in their letters to British newspapers.
LEAVING HOME
Meanwhile, British Gurkhas are abandoning their lairs and nests in Nepal and elsewhere. Brunei’s GRU is reportedly desolate now; its men and their families have flown in droves to the UK, its Gurkha Children’s School closed for good, and its teachers repatriated to Nepal. The celebrated spick-and-span Gurkha conclaves in Pokhara and Dharan are gradually abandoned, its residents opting for Britain to escape their hopeless prospects in Nepal.
A couple of months ago, Mitra Pariyar from Oxford wrote in the weekly Newsfront about a British Gurkha being granted residence in Britain. Pariyar wrote touchingly on this man once owning a lovely bungalow on the other side of the Ring Road in Kathmandu. But he was repeatedly harassed by “political” goons for “donations”, meaning straightforward extortion of “either give, or die.” Now the migrant lives on his pension, has a job, too, but is beset by British taxes, rising expenses and worldwide recession and a possibility of redundancy at his workplace. He has a photograph of his house in Kathmandu hanging above his bed, and he looks at it every now and then. He has no reason or dream to come back. More importantly, he has heard that his fellow Gurkhas have taken over the transport sector of Wales. For himself, he has obtained from Her Majesty’s Government what were rightfully his: Justice, honor and recognition.
DID YOU SAY “LAHUREY”?
The Gurkhas are called Lahurey-s, a term I have avoided so far in this story. However, the misnomer of a moniker must be explained now.
“Lahurey” comes from Lahore, the old capital of the Lion of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, who fought against the British. The actual Lahureys from Nepal are Generals Bal Bhadra Kunwar and Amar Singh Thapa who, being disillusioned by the Durbar’s stupidity in Kathmandu, decided to leave their motherland and joined the Sikh leader’s camp. Bal Bhadra met his fate in one Khyber campaign against the Afghans. Nepali historians are selectively mute on these unfortunate and tragic sons of Nepal.
The British Gurkhas may have their original umbilical cord with the first battalion formed in Shirmoor and the recruitment camp at Quetta. The Shirmoor Battalion captured two Afghan/Russian cannons which, in their polished splendor, fronted the Gun Club (named after the booty) on Austin Road in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The official name of Gun Club was Gurkha Transit Regiment (GTR). Whatever happened to the guns? Reportedly, the Chinese have padlocked the barracks and complexes of the Brigade of Gurkhas in Kowloon, Hong Kong, Sek Kong and other cantonments, perhaps deciding to let the relics run to the ground on their own terms.
In Nepal, until the derogatory and mistaken term “Lahurey” is rescinded and rectified, there is no hope of rewriting the Gurkha history correctly in the hands of those ruling cliques in Kathmandu, who are, well, not Gurkhas – either in spirit, deed or in heritage.
For better or worse, the British Gurkhas have found a new home in Britain, after their forebears carved their niches in India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Fiji and elsewhere.
(Concluded)
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