‘You grow up with footballs.
We grow up with kukris’
James Delingpole meets the Gurkha veterans seeking citizenship rights in the courts and says that, this time, the government has picked the wrong fight It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans.
A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 exGurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their unmistakable crimson-ribboned bronze crosses stuck proudly on their chests. There are currently only ten living recipients of the Victoria Cross and three, it almost goes without saying, are Gurkhas.
Tulbahadur Pun (now 86) won his in June 1944 at the turning-point of the Burma campaign, when almost all his section had been wiped out by Japanese machine guns at the Mogaung railway bridge. Firing his Bren from the hip he continued to advance alone under shattering fire till he reached the enemy bunker, polishing off three of the occupants with his kukri (the Gurkhas’ legendary curved 18-inch fighting knife) and causing five more to flee in understandable terror.
The VC of Lachhiman Gurung (now 91) must rank among the most implausible ever. In May 1945 his forward post at Taungdaw, Burma, was attacked by 200 of the enemy. With his two comrades lying wounded at his feet, Gurung — all 4ft 6in of him — continued to hold his position single-handed for four hours. Quite literally single-handed, for his right hand — and his right eye — had been blown away by a grenade. Calmly, he continued loading and firing his rifle with his left arm alone, killing at least 31 Japanese at point-blank range.
‘But we don’t want to give the impression it’s only VCs that matter,’ says the Gurkhas’ lawyer Martin Howe, and he’s quite right. When VCs are involved, the government can worm its way out with special dispensations, as it did last year with Pun, after the scandalous episode in which he was initially denied permission to settle in Britain for urgent medical treatment because he had ‘failed to demonstrate strong ties with the UK’.
It’s the other Gurkhas we should worry about: the ones who have given the best of their lives fighting for King or Queen and Country — that’s Britain, not their native Nepal — but now find themselves turned away in their hour of greatest need. Under current pettifogging regulations, only those discharged after 1 July 1997 — when the brigade’s HQ moved to the UK from Hong Kong — are eligible for ‘fast track’ citizenship. All the others — the second world war veterans, the ones who served with distinction in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and the Falklands — face the thankless task of persuading the immigration courts that they have ‘close ties’ to the UK. To give you an idea how hard this is, consider the fate of Lance Corporal Gyanendra Rai. He served in the Falklands war, was mentioned in dispatches and severely wounded by Argentine shellfire, yet his application was refused.
As the sage Rod Liddle himself pointed out the last time this issue cropped up, you’ll get a bigger welcome in Britain these days if you’re a pistol-packing Libyan, a suicidally fundamentalist Algerian or a Somali rapist than you will if you’re a plucky, ever-cheerful, fiercely loyal little Johnny Gurkha. (And they are all little, by the way: if it weren’t for the tea-coloured skin, the broad-brimmed jungle hats and the posters saying things like ‘Gurkhas won 13 VCs but still unwanted by UK’, you might think you’d wandered into a hobbits’ convention).
But this isn’t about justice, it’s about a cashstrapped, morally bankrupt government running scared. Eager to be seen to be tough on immigration, panicked by the extra burden that will be placed on the Treasury, terrified of the knock-on effect it might have on Gurkha pensions, and instinctively ill-disposed towards a unit which smacks far too much of the glory days of Empire, the government is fighting the case tooth and nail.
It’s picked the wrong fight, though. Absolutely no one outside the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence has any sympathy with its position. ‘Immigration is not normally a popular subject, but on this occasion we’ve got the whole country behind us,’ says Howe. According to one estimate, the total additional cost to the Treasury should the Gurkhas win their case will be around £200 million. ‘Beer money,’ says Howe. Well, not always, perhaps — but definitely where the Gurkhas are concerned. The British public just can’t get enough of them. We’ve been blood brothers since the Anglo-Nepalese war ended (in a draw: you can’t win against Gurkhas) in 1816 and we’re not about to sever that tie over a sum constituting roughly one third of the amount the MOD spends every year on compensation claims.
Since 1817, Johnny Gurkha has served alongside British troops in pretty much every war we’ve ever fought. Around 100,000 of them fought in the first world war; around 250,000 in the second. In that period, almost 50,000 of them died in action, 150,000 were seriously wounded, and they earned themselves 6,500 military decorations, including 13 individual VCs and another 13 regimental VCs. There are currently around 17,000 applications for the 230 places offered in the Brigade of Gurkhas each year. To qualify you must be able to carry a 25kg bag of rocks on a six-kilometre run up and down vertiginous Nepalese slopes in under 35 minutes.
‘You always felt safe as houses when the Gurkhas were around,’ recalled Alf Jordan, an 8th Army veteran of the North Africa and Italy campaigns, who’d joined the Gurkhas’ Monday protest march on Number 10 in a gesture of solidarity. ‘You’d be told, “The Gurkhas are on your right.” And you’d go: “Thank God for that.” And they’d look after you even though half the time you didn’t know they were there.’ One night he remembers being advised to watch out for a Gurkha patrol coming back through his positions. ‘We kept waiting and waiting but we never saw a thing. “What happened?” we asked. “Was there a change of plan?” They’d come through us, all right though. We just hadn’t noticed.’ ‘So what is it that makes you lot so great?’ I asked Bhimrajtum Bhangphe, who served in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor. ‘Where you grow up kicking footballs, we grow up playing with bows and arrows and our kukris which we use for everything, even sharpening our pencils. That is our tradition because we want to be the best fighters on the planet,’ he said. ‘But our secret for winning the war is love. We love each other. We respect our comrades. We respect our commanding officer.’ They also have an inspirational motto ‘Better to die than be a coward,’ and a particularly stirring battle cry: ‘Ayo Gorkhali!’ Can you think of any people on earth more deserving of our hospitality than the smiling, noble warrior race that gave us men like Lachhiman Gurung and Tulbahadur Pun? They could bring knife crime to a swift and bloody end, for a start.
Previous page
