Forgotten Atrocities: The British Empire's Rawalpindi Experiments

The British are often praised for their “stiff upper lip”, a phrase that masks not courage but a thick skin and a habit of brushing their sins under the carpet. Few empires in history have matched their hypocrisy.

While the West continues to shout from the rooftops about Auschwitz, Nazi gas chambers, and the horrors inflicted on Jews, Britain’s own record of wartime experiments on Indians remains buried in silence.

This dark chapter is known as the Rawalpindi Experiments. Exposed by The Guardian in 2007, the story revealed that from the 1930s, scientists at Porton Down tested the effects of mustard gas not in laboratories, but on living human subjects.

The chosen victims were not volunteers, but Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army, marched into gas chambers in Rawalpindi—then part of undivided India.

Clad only in shorts and thin cotton shirts, these men were deliberately exposed to poison gas. The goal was not to find cures but to refine methods of killing.

Hundreds suffered severe burns, blisters, and respiratory damage, many requiring hospitalization. The long-term consequences remain unknown, for there was no follow-up. The men were simply discarded, studied, scarred, and forgotten.

Mustard gas is not just immediately toxic; it is carcinogenic, causing cancers and lifelong illness. White soldiers were also subjected to trials, but when the scandal emerged, Britain apologized and offered compensation to them. Indians, however, received nothing. Not even an acknowledgment.

The silence of the Indian state is equally damning. Neither provincial governments of the colonial era nor independent India raised their voices. When the truth surfaced globally in 2007, New Delhi remained quiet, unwilling to “spoil relations” with the United Kingdom.

British officials, when confronted, justified the Rawalpindi Experiments with tired excuses: “different times,” “wartime necessity,” “we were at war.” Yet, when comparisons are drawn to Nazi gas chambers, they bristle, insisting they were “different.” But were they?

The world rightly condemns the Nazi atrocities against Jews. But for the Indian soldiers, brown men treated as expendable, the outrage never came. They were children of a lesser god, sacrificed in silence, erased from history, and left without justice.

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