A single cavalry charge in September 1918 — Indian lancers thundering into an Ottoman-held port city — still divides memory more than a century later. On the 108th anniversary of the Battle of Haifa, Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor has turned to the opinion pages to examine why one episode of Indian military heroism is simultaneously a point of pride, grief, and geopolitical complexity.

The charge that took Haifa — and what it means now

On 23 September 1918, Indian cavalry units — principally the Jodhpur Lancers, alongside the Mysore and Hyderabad Lancers — executed a mounted assault on the port city of Haifa, then held by Ottoman Empire forces, during the broader Sinai and Palestine campaign of World War I. The city fell. It was one of the last successful cavalry charges in military history, and it was led by soldiers from princely states fighting under British imperial command thousands of kilometres from home.

Tharoor notes on X that the event is 'variously celebrated and mourned by Israelis and Palestinians' — a compact phrase that carries enormous weight. For Israel, the liberation of Haifa is woven into a founding geography; for Palestinians, the same city holds a different and painful historical resonance, particularly given what followed in 1948. The Indian lancers are, in a sense, caught between two contested narratives neither of which they authored.

India's million-strong WWI commitment — and its selective memory

India deployed over one million troops to the Allied war effort between 1914 and 1918, with a significant contingent committed to the Middle Eastern theatre. The scale of that contribution is rarely foregrounded in mainstream Indian public discourse, which tends to anchor WWI memory in the Western Front or in the broader anti-colonial critique of imperial conscription. The Battle of Haifa is an exception — it is specific, dramatic, and documented — and it has periodically re-emerged in Indian commentary as evidence of pre-independence military capability and sacrifice.

Tharoor has long been among the most prominent voices pushing for fuller acknowledgement of India's WWI role, situating it within his wider argument about colonialism, reparations, and the cost of empire to Indian society. His framing here, however, takes a more nuanced turn: rather than straightforward commemoration, he signals a reflection on how a single historical event can be 'variously celebrated and mourned' depending on who is doing the remembering.

Between Tel Aviv and Ramallah — India's careful West Asia balance

India established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 while simultaneously maintaining its long-standing support for Palestinian self-determination at the United Nations. That balancing act has grown more delicate as the region's conflicts have intensified. Invoking the Battle of Haifa in this climate is not a neutral act of history-telling — it places India's colonial-era military footprint squarely inside one of the world's most contested geographies.

Tharoor's piece in The Hindu — the full argument of which cannot be independently verified — appears, from his post, to grapple with precisely this layering: how a moment of genuine Indian martial achievement sits inside a history that neither India's Israel policy nor its Palestinian solidarity can fully accommodate. It is the kind of question that military anniversaries tend to suppress and that opinion writers are better placed to ask.

One hundred and eight years on, the Jodhpur Lancers' charge still gallops into arguments that have no clean finish line.