Peter J Karthak

The Nepali Gurkha story in Singapore begins years before the actual formation of the famed Gurkhas-manned Singapore Police. This can itself be gleaned from the autobiography (first volume) of Singapore’s founding father and its first Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew.

When Singapore was blitzkriegd by the advancing Imperial Japanese Army and compelled Great Britain, the greatest imperial power in history, to surrender Singapore, the Pacific theater of the Second World War escalated with the naval entrance of the United States.

It was then young Lee Kuan Yew saw from his house the prisoner of war camps which held defeated Allied soldiers. Among the nationalities of the imprisoned armies, two races caught Lee’s greatest attention: The Gurkhas of Nepal, and the Scots. Even in inhuman conditions as prisoners of war, the Gurkhas and the Scots held their heads high, maintained their morale and dignity at all times, and behaved and conducted themselves remarkably well – inherently proud racial traits which did not escape the eyes of Lee.

When Lee became perforce the first Prime Minister of Singapore, which was unilaterally divorced from Malaya/Malaysia and rife anew with ethnic and political tensions in the nascent city republic, the new leader chose to induct and employ the martial ethnics from Nepal as riot police force and crowd controllers to quell the increasing disturbances caused by the infant nation’s main mutually squabbling groups – Malays, Chinese, and to some extent Indians – violently promoting their vested political and communal interests. To Yew, the Gurkhas of Nepal were not merely the bravest fighters in war and most valorous soldiers in peacetime; they were also most reputedly impartial and full of fair play because they were devoid of fanaticism of any provocation, and not taken to committing any war crimes in their long history of martial engagements. Above all, as Lee had already observed, they were apolitical and thus free of human prejudices of any color, including political frailties.

Thus was born the legend and institution of the Singapore Police Force, manned mainly by Nepal’s Gurkhas, on the express orders of Lee Kuan Yew when he became Singapore’s reluctant and weeping leader, and his decision has been in place to this day. The reasons are most obvious: A major share of the peace and prosperity of Singapore today from a derelict swampy marshland and war-ravaged and internally divisive post-War island republic to a glittering metropolis of world standards and clouts goes in no small measures to the Singapore Gurkha Police.

Soon, the Sultanate of Brunei also decided to emulate Lee Kuan Yew by commissioning its own Gurkha force to protect the Sultan’s Istana (‘sthan’, palace) and the capital city of Bandar Seri Bagawan (the Port of Shree Bhagwan).

As historical turns would have it in the post-war, post-independence and the resultant internal and regional internecine periods of South Asia and South East Asia, the present Sultan’s father, among other leaders, was forced to seek help from Britain to check the expansionist ambitions of Indonesia’s Sukarno (Soekarno) over Brunei. Britain obliged its former colony by mobilizing its Gurkha contingent to check Sukarno’s advances. It was the Gurkhas who discovered and rescued the beleaguered Sultan from a place called Lawas and was restored to his Istana. Out of personal gratitude to the Gurkhas, the old Sultan – the present ruling Sultan’s late father – formed his own Gurkha Reserve Unit (GRU) at Bandar Seri Begawan, and the British lent a Gurkha regiment to protect Seria, the oil and gas fields of Brunei. That the then Corporal Ram Bahadur Limbu of the British Brigade of Gurkhas won the then latest VC (Victoria Cross) medal in the same Indonesian campaign was a fitting finale to concluding the confusions prevalent in the dense subtropics of Southeast Asia to shortly later allow the region to produce its own Asian Tigers. The Gurkhas created level grounds wherever they were pressed into service in Southeast Asia in the post-1950 decades.

But the involvement of Gurkhas in SE Asia begins in the immediate post-WWII period itself. This began on the Burma Front where the Allies defeated the Axis, most notably the Japanese. Soon the Gurkhas, too, would report back to their units, regiments and brigades in India and go back to their hills on a well-deserved home leave and furloughs.

But it was not to be so for certain units of Gurkhas in Burma. They were ordered for immediate mobilization further east, to an unknown city called Saigon. Our grandfathers’ tales have it that the unfortunate Gurkhas wrung their hands in Burma, shouting in disbelief – “Yo ladai kahile sakine ho, hou! Hey Bhagwan!!” The Gurkhas were not shell-shocked or battle-fatigued or war-weary – they were bored by and with war, and that was not a very good thing!

But it was the fledging UN Charter that decreed that the Gurkhas be in Saigon to quell and tame some 150 political groups fighting among themselves for power and place in Vietnam’s future. So off they went further east while their fortunate fellow Gurkhas were westbound, to their mother regiments and home on the hills of Nepal.

Under the newly fluttering UN flag, the WWII veteran Gurkhas of Burma were reduced or “demoted” to a mere constabulary or police force to maintain civil discipline and law and order in the French colonial city. The history of Indochina and the French and American archives should unravel more details on the almost-forgotten Gurkha engagements in what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City.

After the Gurkhas left Saigon, Dien Bien Phu happened, and the rest is, well, history.

In Asia at large and taking stock of the 20th century only, the Gurkhas have seen action in the Khyber Pass, and been on the Francis Younghusband expedition to Lhasa via Sikkim. Fighting a world war in Burma, policing in Indochina, cleaning of Communists in Malaya/Malaysia, taming strife in Singapore, checking the enemy in Borneo, and facing the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong, the Gurkhas of Nepal have made a full circle of Asia Major and Minor.

In Nepal, however, the Gurkhas are a sparsely acknowledged lot. There are national reasons for that: One, Gurkhas are essentially doers, and they don’t write their own stories; they would rather choose to fade away, as honorable soldiers do, after counting their remaining days in pension and memories. Secondly, most Nepali historians, scholars and pen-pushers and town-criers are non-Gurkhas, and they don’t give a smidgen to their fellow Nepali Gurkhas for all they have achieved for Nepal for nearly 200 years – as Nepal’s first perennial remittance earners since 1820, bringing home more than a dozen Victoria Cross medals……and …. Well, the list is long!

It is at home that the Gurkhas are hailed as “mercenaries” and “blood-sellers” by their fellow non-Gurkha Nepalis; they are labeled “Lahure”-s by politically polarized Nepalis and other export-reject fellow ethnic Gurkhas.

It is, therefore, only timely and appropriate to acknowledge that a foreign photographer and storyteller like Zakaria Zainal, a repeat visitor to Nepal, has done something solid on a native subject that is largely neglected in its native nation itself. As a Singaporean Muslim Malay, one can assume that Zainal is paying his dues to certain ethnic groups of Nepal called the Gurkhas for what they did to make Singapore what it is today. The Gurkhas started with Zainal’s grandparents’ generation in Singapore, and he himself knows more about being a present-day Singaporean, today, than anyone else. We must look at his work on the pensioner Gurkhas of the Singapore Police in this light.

The writer is the copy chief at The Week and can be contacted at [email protected]

Published on: 2 November 2012 | Republica