Haifa at 108: One Cavalry Charge, Three Memories and the Question India Must Answer Honestly

Haifa Is Not One Memory but Three and India Owns Only One of Them In April 1915, Australian and New

Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli in a campaign planned in London. It ended in evacuation. Within a generation, that defeat had become the founding story of two nations and Anzac Day is still their most solemn date. This is not new. Peoples whose soldiers fought for an empire have repeatedly taken those wars back and rewritten them as chapters of their own history.

India has done the same thing with its own monuments. India Gate was raised by the imperial government as the All India War Memorial to Indian soldiers of the First World War. Independent India placed the Amar Jawan Jyoti beneath its arch after the 1971 war.

In January 2022 that flame was merged into the National War Memorial. One monument has carried three meanings in one century and each reinterpretation was India talking to itself.

Haifa as the latest instance of the pattern The 2018 renaming of Teen Murti as Teen Murti Haifa Chowk belongs to the same pattern.

On September 23, 1918, the Jodhpur, Mysore and Hyderabad Lancers, led prominently by Major Dalpat Singh, charged fortified positions and took Haifa. British war diaries credit that charge with opening the Allied advance towards Damascus.

More than a million Indians served overseas in that war and over 74,000 did not return. Naming a Delhi landmark after their victory says something specific: Indian agency existed even inside imperial command. That claim is historically sound and worth making.

Where the

parallel breaks down The Gallipoli and India Gate stories share one feature Haifa lacks: nobody else's homeland depends on how they are remembered. Haifa's victory helped secure British control over Palestine. That control was the ground on which the 1917 Balfour Declaration was put into effect and it began a chain of events that Palestinians remember as dispossession.

So the charge up Mount Carmel now carries three memories:

• India: recovered agency, the valour of subjects who shaped world events before the Republic existed -

Israel: liberation of the city, built into a story of gratitude and strategic friendship -

Palestine: the start of foreign rule. As Palestinian representatives have put it, "We did not ask you to liberate us." There is a second break. The Anzacs came from self-governing dominions that turned their war into nationhood. The lancers were princely-state troops who had no say in the peace their victory produced. Their courage was theirs; the consequences were not.

What mature memory looks like The answer is neither silence nor celebration.

It is to separate the soldier from the settlement: honour the Lancers' valour fully and decline to endorse the imperial project it served. That is the same discipline India already applies when it remembers the Indians who fought in the First World War without celebrating the empire that sent them.

For the exam, colonial India's role in the world wars is never really about the battles. Examiners reward the candidate who can hold the soldier's agency and the empire's purpose in the same paragraph. Answers that only celebrate or only condemn miss that.