Loyal Gurkha gets less than Tommy Atkins

The death of a British Gurkha soldier recently in Kosovo, detonating unexploded NATO bombs, has reopened the dispute in Nepal over its soldiers serving under discriminatory conditions in the British army.

The Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen's Organisation (GAESO) in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, has accused the British government of defying the Race Relations Act by paying unequal compensation and pensions to Gurkha soldiers who have served its army loyally for 184 years.

Nepal's ruling Congress party and opposition MPs have demanded an end to the discrimination that allowed disparity between payments made to Gurkha and British soldiers.

"We demand that the British government pay compensation equal to what an English soldier would get," Mr Ram Bahadur Gurung, a Congress MP, told parliament.

Sgt Balaram Rai of the Queen's Gurkha Engineers was killed along with his British commanding officer when a pile of unexploded "bomblets" dropped by NATO warplanes exploded before they could detonate them in a "controlled" explosion. His body was flown home at the weekend and buried in his hometown of Dharan in the Himalayan foothills, 300 miles east of Kathmandu.

The British ministry of defence has said it will pay Ashanti, the sergeant's 30-year-old widow, a mere 7.5 per cent of what the widow of an equivalent British soldier would receive. She will be given an immediate payment of £19,092, a pension of £939 a year for five years, after which it will drop to £771.48 for the rest of her life. The dead sergeant also leaves behind two children, aged four and six, and two aged parents who were dependent on him.

Meanwhile, around 3,200 Gurkhas serving with the British army and around 26,000 who have retired and are living across Nepal are pinning their hopes on a case filed against the British government by a former soldier claiming discrimination in the pension paid to him. In his petition, Lance Cpl Hari Thapa claims that during 15 years of service in the British army he was paid 60p a day compared with £51 earned by a British soldier of the same rank. And after retirement, Mr Thapa said he got £17.50 a month as pension while the comparable amount paid to a British soldier was substantially higher.

Mr Thapa's case has GAESO's backing. The association's vice-president, Mr Krishna Kumar Rai, said in operational matters Gurkha soldiers were treated like their British counterparts, made to fight wars and participate in conflicts.

"For a Gurkha, joining a foreign army is born out of economic compulsion," said Deepak Thapa, a leading Nepalese journalist whose grandfather and father fought in the two World Wars. The idea that a Gurkha soldier can live cheaply in Nepal and therefore make do with a significantly smaller pension smacks of arrogant racism, he said.

The British connection with Gurkha soldiers dates back to the early 19th century when Nepal made territorial incursions into colonial India and an expeditionary force was dispatched to curb them.

A series of indecisive battles followed in which each side earned the grudging admiration of the other, resulting eventually in a treaty in 1815 under which a British resident was installed in Kathmandu and recruitment of Gurkha soldiers into the British Indian army began.

Thereafter the legend of the fearless Gurkha warrior with his deathly khukri or massive curved knife, which is never unsheathed without drawing blood, became known to the outside world. The hardy Gurkhas served in two World Wars, 15 of them winning the Victoria Cross during the second World War. Under cover of darkness, Gurkha soldiers would crawl behind enemy lines, feel the boot laces of the sentries and if they were not done up British style, soundlessly decapitate them with khukris. German troops were terrified of the Gurkhas and even today there are few Gurkha battalions in the Indian army which believe in taking prisoners of war.

Under the Joint Partition Committee, instituted after Indian independence in 1947, six of 10 Gurkha Rifle regiments remained in the Indian army, while four regiments voted to soldier for the British.

According to a further tripartite agreement between Nepal, India and Britain, all Gurkha troops in the Indian and British armies were to be paid the same wage and would subsequently receive equal pensions. Allowances in the British army, however, were substantially higher, making service there more popular.

But it was only two years ago, after a series of protests, that the British government raised the Gurkhas' pay to that of other soldiers. But their pensions remained the same, bound by the 1947 agreement. In a rare gesture of magnanimity the British also permitted the wives and families of around 3,000 Gurkha troops to join them in England, something that was forbidden earlier.

"The British preach human rights but don't apply them when it comes to paying equal pensions and benefits to Gurkha soldiers who do most of the fighting for them," said Mr Ram Lal Rai (75), a veteran of the second World War and several other British military campaigns.

The British still maintain a recruitment centre at Pokhra in western Nepal and induct around 230 Gurkhas annually. They are rounded up by the gallah wallahs or recruiting sergeants who roam the upper reaches of the Himalayas, scouring remote villages for these fearless warriors who know little other than soldiering in foreign lands.