The Sikh Regiment traces to units raised from 1846, after the First Anglo-Sikh War, from soldiers of the army that had just been defeated. It is among the most decorated regiments in the Indian Army.
Its battle honours run from Lucknow and the Defence of Arrah in 1857 through Saragarhi in 1897, the two world wars, Burma, and the wars of 1947, 1965, 1971 and Kargil.
Recruitment was and largely still is from Jat Sikhs. The Sikh Light Infantry, a separate regiment, recruits from Mazhabi and Ramdasia Sikhs, communities treated as low caste. The two exist as separate regiments for that reason and the distinction dates from British recruitment policy.
That is worth saying plainly. A religion whose founding act was the abolition of caste distinction has two regiments in the Indian Army divided along caste lines, and the division was made by a colonial administration and kept by an independent one.
The regimental centre is at Ramgarh in Jharkhand.
The Sikh Light Infantry's own line runs back through the Mazhabi and Ramdasia pioneer units of the nineteenth century, raised first as labour and sapper corps and later as fighting battalions. It was formed as a regiment in 1941 and took its present name in 1944.
It is among the most decorated regiments of the Indian Army and its recruitment is still substantially from the Punjab districts, with a strong hereditary element by village and family.
A battalion of each can serve in the same brigade, and the men in them are of one religion, from the same districts, often from neighbouring villages. Nobody proposes merging them. The army's position is that regimental identity is what makes men fight, and it is not wrong about that, which is where the difficulty sits.