(This article, written by Geoffrey Van Orden, appeared in the HISTORY Reclaimed. Commonwealth War Graves Discrimination Claims Reviewed)

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is one of our great institutions. It looks after a million war graves in more than 23,000 locations worldwide. In 2021, during the BLM onslaught, it limply allowed its reputation to be besmirched by unfair allegations of racial discrimination.

In 2019, at the height of the imported “Black Lives Matter” furore, David Lammy MP fronted “The Unremembered”, a Channel 4 documentary that sought to highlight discrimination in commemoration of African war dead by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). The programme was researched by a social theorist and feminist, Professor Michèle Barrett, who became a leading member of a special committee subsequently established by the CWGC to “Review Historical Inequalities in Commemoration”. Its remit was not just Africa but “to search for any similar problems that might exist elsewhere”. Its findings were published in 2021. Tendentiously, it found that “overarching imperial ideology connected to racial and religious differences were used to divide the dead and treat them unequally in ways that were impossible in Europe”. It seems to have been determined to ascribe base motives to administrators working in difficult circumstances a century ago. The CWGC was criticised for not looking for problems and not making them public. Helpfully, the Guardian felt able to report “pervasive racism” in the commemoration of black and Asian servicemen. The well had been successfully poisoned. Even six years later, as he observed Commonwealth High Commissioners laying their wreaths at the Cenotaph on 9 November 2025, the BBC narrator of the Remembrance Day commemorations could not resist commenting that their troops often “never received a proper grave”.

Visiting our war graves all over the world, I have always been struck by the equal and respectful commemoration of the deaths of not only British soldiers but those from the Empire, of all ranks and religions, who had served in every theatre of war. In addition to those from Africa and the Caribbean, some 4 million Indian soldiers served during the two World Wars in the British Indian armies in Burma, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. They were all volunteers, recruited primarily but not exclusively, from the Sikhs and Muslims of the Punjab. The spectacular India Gate landmark memorial in Delhi, erected during the Raj, has the names of the 70,000 Indian soldiers who died between 1914 and 1921. The CWGC’s Haidar Pasha cemetery in Istanbul, located next to the barrack site of Florence Nightingale’s hospital, has the well-laid out and individually named graves of Muslim soldiers of the British Indian Army.

I was particularly fortunate, over 40 years ago, to spend a year with the Indian Armed Forces, attending their Defence Services Staff College at Wellington in the Nilgiri Hills of South India and visiting Indian military units all over India. We had a great bond of shared traditions and experience. Nowhere did I meet hostility, quite the opposite. Indian officers and their families from those days continue to be among our closest friends. One of those officers, a retired Major General, joined me a few years ago for a tour of battlefields in Flanders. He was greatly moved by the individual names of the many Indian soldiers inscribed on the magnificent Menin Gate among the 54,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres salient with no known grave.

The idea that Britain would deliberately discriminate in its commemoration of the Fallen had a very hollow ring to it. I wondered what truly motivated those that thought it useful to deliberately seek out some example for complaint and what their motive was in impugning the work of yet another great national institution.

In 2024, on Remembrance Day, the Nagaland Government in India’s North East region hosted a magnificent service at the Commonwealth War Grave in Kohima. The Pipes & Drums of the Assam Rifles, the Assam Regiment band and the band of the Nagaland Police played to the many official guests led by the Chief Minister, Neiphiu Rio. They were there to pay their respects to the British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers of the British Indian Army who lost their lives in the terrible events culminating in the siege of Kohima, 80 years ago in April 1944. Kohima was the crucial land battle that turned the Japanese back at the gateway of India.

As a former British Army Brigadier, I was treated as an honoured guest, invited to lay a wreath and join the Chief Minister’s commemorative events. Everywhere, I received only warm welcome. As I walked with Indian friends among the 1,420 individual graves of British and Indian Muslim soldiers, we saw that each tablet was similar and each bore the name of the fallen soldier buried beneath. According to their tradition, the 917 Sikh and Hindu fatalities at Kohima were cremated. We read their names on the great stone edifice commemorating their sacrifice.

We do an enormous disservice to ourselves, to the descendants of the Fallen, to understanding of our shared history, to national integration and cohesion, and to our international relationships, if we encourage politically-motivated activists to give currency to distorted allegations of deliberate discrimination. Of course, omissions and mistakes should be corrected – as they have been in many cases over the years.

We should greatly welcome initiatives to increase knowledge of those who served in our armed forces from across the Commonwealth during the World Wars and beyond. This should not just be a matter of commemoration but of instilling consciousness of our proud shared history, particularly among young people whose parents or grandparents chose to move to Britain from other Commonwealth countries. This could be one of the most powerful instruments in integrating newcomers into our national culture.

Geoffrey Van Orden is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.