There is no ‘special war memorial’ for Gurkha or Sikh soldiers who fought with the British Army.
This isn’t true. A number of statues have been erected since the 1990s to honour Gurkha and Sikh soldiers who fought with British forces, and a 1921 memorial also exists in Sussex to Indian Sikh and Hindu soldiers who died in the First World War.
Following the government announcement that £1 million would be invested towards a memorial for Muslim soldiers, we’ve seen claims on social media suggesting there are no such memorials for Sikh and Gurkha soldiers.
During his speech announcing the details of the Spring Budget on Wednesday 6 March, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said the government would provide funding to build a memorial to honour Muslims soldiers from around the world who died in the two World Wars fighting in British and Allied armed forces.
He said the decision followed representations from former chancellor Sir Sajid Javid and others who have been campaigning for a memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire to commemorate around 140,000 fallen Muslim soldiers.
However, since the announcement in the Budget, we’ve seen posts circulating on social media appearing to question this decision and suggesting that there is no corresponding memorial for Gurkha or Sikh soldiers.
One Facebook post, which uses the same image and caption as a post shared hundreds of times on X (formerly Twitter), says: “The Gurkhas...... no special war memorial for them ...... only Muslims.”
Another post on Facebook asks: “What about the shiksand [Sikhs and] the Gurkhas that died in the war?for us [sic].”
But there are already a number of memorials in the UK which honour the contribution of both Gurkha and Sikh soldiers.
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The Brigade of Gurkhas is part of the British Army and consists of soldiers recruited from Nepal. Across both World Wars more than 238,000 Gurkhas enlisted into the Brigade.
In the First World War more than 6,300 Gurkhas were killed in action, with the Brigade suffering over 9,000 deaths in the Second World War.
There are now several memorials that honour their war-time and ongoing military contributions, which have been erected.
Perhaps most prominent is the statue of a Gurkha soldier which was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on Horse Guards Avenue in London in 1997.
A memorial statue of a Gurkha soldier was erected in the Garden of Remembrance in Folkestone in 2015, paid for by public donations. The same year a statue for World War One Sikh soldiers was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum.
And in 2014 a memorial called The Chautara—a traditional Nepalese resting place—to honour Gurkha soldiers killed while serving in the British Army had been installed at the arboretum.
The National Memorial Arboretum is the envisioned location for the planned memorial to Muslim soldiers who died serving with Britain and its allies during the two World Wars.
More recently, in 2021, a bronze statue of the first Nepalese Gurkha recipient of the Victoria Cross, Kulbir Thapa Magar, was unveiled in Princes Gardens in Aldershot.
The statue commemorates the service of Gurkha veterans and serving soldiers and was commissioned by the Greater Rushmoor Nepali Community group.
A Gurkha memorial garden with a chautara also exists at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens in Hampshire, which was created in 1997.
There are also a number of existing memorials that honour the contributions of Sikh soldiers who fought for the British Indian army.
These include the Leicester Sikh Memorial, located in Victoria Park in Leicester, which was unveiled in 2022.
A similar statue of a Sikh Soldier was unveiled in 2019 in Greenhead Park in Huddersfield, dedicated to the memory of Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army who fought in the two World Wars.
In Bristol a sculpture and plaque was installed in 2019 in Castle Park, bearing the names of Sikh soldiers who died fighting in both wars.
A memorial was installed in 2002 in Coventry to honour the Sikh Regiment which served with the British army from 1850 to 1945.
Additionally there is a memorial obelisk, marking the First World War Indian Army Convalescent Depot at Barton on Sea, which was unveiled in 1917.
And the Chattri memorial, which was created in 1921 on the Downs above Brighton, marks the site where the ashes of fallen Hindu and Sikh Indian soldiers, who had been hospitalised at the Dome in Brighton after fighting on the Western Front, were scattered.
Incorrect claims like these can spread misleading information online. Full Fact has written in depth about the 2024 Spring Budget, including claims around falling crime levels and public debt.
Image courtesy of Peter Trimming
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because a number of memorials and statues already exist to commemorate Gurkha and Sikh soldiers.
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