Talks between the British government and representatives of former Gurkha soldiers, that has been stalled for several months after the reshuffle of the UK cabinet, have regained momentum, according to Nepali language diaspora outlet Nepalilink. An informal meeting over dinner will be held at the Nepali Embassy in London on Monday, September 14, which bring together UK Minister for Veterans and People Calvin Bailey and representatives of Gurkha organisations affiliated with the G10 grouping.
The topic at stake is a dispute that dates back nearly 80 years, to a promise Britain has never fully kept.
The broken promise at the centre of the dispute
Nepali soldiers have served the British Crown since 1815, first within the British Indian Army. When India became independent in 1947, four Gurkha regiments transferred into the newly formed British Army under the Tripartite Agreement, signed in Kathmandu that November between the governments of the United Kingdom, India and Nepal. That agreement stated Gurkhas should receive pay, pensions and benefits equal to British soldiers of the same rank. Instead, the British government based Gurkha pensions on the Indian Army's pay code, through the Gurkha Pension Scheme (GPS) established in 1949 and index linked to the cost of living in Nepal, on the assumption Gurkhas would retire there. By 1989, a House of Commons report found a resulting pension difference between a British Army captain and a Gurkha captain of same rank had reached as high as 948 percent. Organised campaigning for equal pay and pensions began around 1990.
Why a 2007 reform didn't end the argument?
In 2007, the government let Gurkhas who retired on or after July 1, 1997, transfer their pension into the standard Armed Forces Pension Scheme (AFPS) that British soldiers use but only for service accrued after that cutoff, and only for those who retired after it. Everyone who had already retired before July 1997 was excluded from transferring at all. Since 2007, actively serving Gurkhas have received the same pension terms as everyone else; and hence the dispute that is carried forward is regarding the veterans who served and retired before that includes roughly 6,500 Gurkhas made redundant before 1975, who received one off payments as low as £320–£420 and no pension entitlement at all.
Legal challenges have largely failed to move the government's position: the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2016 that the pension cutoff did not breach anti-discrimination protections, a defeat that pushed campaigners toward direct political pressure instead including a joint list of 36 demands submitted to a UK defence minister in 2017, and hunger strikes by veterans in London in the early 2020s. As of a UK parliamentary written answer from March 2026, the government's official position remains that the 2007 reform resolved the parity issue and that pre 2007 veterans are adequately covered by the Gurkha Pension Scheme , a position campaign groups continue to dispute.
What Monday's meeting could realistically produce
The demand of the core campaigning group remains full retrospective pension parity recognising all pre 1997 Gurkha service as equal as with the British soldiers and not just about the cutoff . A narrower version of that demand, addressing only the roughly 6,500 pre 1975 veterans left with no pension whatsoever, is a smaller, more clearly defined ask that has surfaced repeatedly in past negotiations and may be the more realistic near-term outcome.
For now, Monday's meeting is a resumption of dialogue after months of silence, not a announced resolution. ICN will follow up on what, if anything, was agreed.
