Commonwealth Troops: First World War

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

I would like to congratulate the hon. Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal)—for stealing most of my speech. It was absolutely wonderful and very powerful.

We live in very polarising times. As the hon. Member for Bolton South and Walkden (Yasmin Qureshi) mentioned, all debates seem to be along the lines of our differences—what religion we are, what colour we are, what creed we are and where we come from. These debates are sadly not just on the airwaves or the news channels, but in this Chamber. It is all about what divides us, and not what brings us together. That is why I thank the hon. Member for Ilford South, in all seriousness, for bringing this debate to the Chamber; it gives us an important opportunity. Many people from my community or background, or from the empire, are not aware of their own history, and so do not have the knowledge to debate these matters coherently.

The contributions made by Commonwealth soldiers in the first world war have been mentioned already by many speakers. They were men of every faith and no faith, and of every colour. Can we imagine living in Africa or British India at a time where there were no televisions and very few photographs, and being sent abroad to a foreign land? It must have been very frightening for them. Some may have seen it as an adventure, but as soon as they landed on this shore, with climates they were unaccustomed to, it must have been a real shock to them.

More than 1.3 million soldiers from British India served in the first world war, including over 400,000 Muslims, 53,000 of whom gave their lives. In total, more than 2.5 million Muslim soldiers and labourers from across the globe supported the allied war effort. The work of the National Muslim War Memorial Trust reminds us that their sacrifice was immense, yet, as we have mentioned already, it is not spoken about very often.

Commonwealth soldiers of all faiths served in the trenches of Europe, in the deserts of north and east Africa, in Madagascar and in the far east. Together, they faced unimaginable hardships, enduring gas attacks, machine gun fire, waterlogged trenches, hunger and fear. We remember that the war was won not only by Britain, but by the Commonwealth united in purpose.

Yet it is painful to acknowledge that the story told through our memorials has been incomplete. Animal sacrifices in the war effort were honoured with a national memorial in Hyde Park in 2004, and rightly so. However, that was way before the black and Asian soldiers who fought, bled and died for Britain were recognised. It is only recently that they have begun to receive that recognition. This is a truth we cannot shy away from. Why did it happen?

We have already heard the story of Khudadad Khan, who was born in 1888 in Punjab and served with the 129th Baluchis, becoming the first Indian soldier to receive the Victoria Cross. We have heard of his bravery in Belgium in 1914, when his regiment was completely outnumbered. Knowing he was the only one alive, he pretended to be dead and slid away in the darkness of the night; he later came back and, as the hon. Member for Ilford South said, changed the destiny of that battle. Now, his descendants live in Leeds. This is not somebody else’s history; it is our history.

Consider Walter Tull, one of the most celebrated black British soldiers of the first world war. He enlisted in 1914, endured shellshock, returned to fight at the Somme and was commissioned as an officer in 1917, despite regulations that should have barred him because of his race. He continued to fight and was mentioned in dispatches for “gallantry and coolness” in Italy in 1918. Sadly, two months later, he died in no man’s land.

Think of Lionel Turpin, a 19-year-old from Guyana who travelled to the mother country, as he called it, to serve on the western front. He survived the Somme, but not the effects of gas attacks. Think, too, of the 60,000 black South Africans and 120,000 other Africans who served in the labour units, and of the men of the British West Indies Regiment who, in 1915, sailed all the way from Jamaica to train on the Sussex coast before being deployed to Egypt and beyond.

These people are not and should never be footnotes in history. They were part of the very fabric of our armed forces. They should not be footnotes, but headlines. That is why, when Laurence Fox questioned the inclusion of a Sikh soldier in the fantastic first world war film “1917”, it exposed not diversity gone too far, but history not yet understood deeply enough. Sikh soldiers made up more than 20% of the British Indian Army during the war. In my city of Leicester, a statue unveiled in 2022 now commemorates their service—long-overdue recognition of their extraordinary loyalty and courage.

We recognise their bravery, we honour their sacrifice and we commit to remembering them. What does their service teach us today? It teaches us that courage knows no nationality, religion or race. If we allow polarisation to divide us along lines of colour or creed, we dishonour those who stood shoulder to shoulder in the mud of Flanders. If we forget the global nature of their sacrifice, we shrink our own national story.

Let us tell that story fully, teach it honestly and commemorate it properly. For lest we forget—by forgetting, we dishonour not only what those troops endured, but the legacy that they pass to us: a nation strengthened, not diminished, by the diversity of those who defended it.