23 September marks the 1918 cavalry action at Haifa. The column's argument is that the battle is remembered in three incompatible ways — as Indian valour, as Israeli liberation, and as Palestinian dispossession — and that a mature reading refuses to collapse them into one.

Figure 1 — Where Haifa sits

Haifa's Mediterranean harbour was the supply point that made the push to Damascus possible. Base geography: Natural Earth 1:10m, public domain.

• Imperial Service Troops: forces maintained by princely states from the 1880s, placed at the Crown's disposal in wartime — the reason Jodhpur, Mysore and Hyderabad units fought in West Asia.
• Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916): the secret Anglo-French understanding partitioning Ottoman Arab territories into spheres of influence.
• Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917): British support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, with the proviso that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. British control after 1918 made its implementation possible.
• Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915-16) and the Arab Revolt: parallel promises of Arab independence — the origin of the charge of contradictory British commitments.
• Mandate and after: the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947) partition plan, the 1948 war and the Nakba; Haifa itself saw large-scale Arab displacement in April 1948.
• Commemoration in India: Teen Murti Memorial in Delhi honours the three cavalry regiments; the chowk was renamed Teen Murti Haifa Chowk in 2018.

• Indian: recovery of military history from the shadow of empire — asserting that Indian soldiers shaped world events before India was sovereign, and that their agency existed within imperial constraint.
• Israeli: the cavalry's role folded into a narrative of gratitude and friendship, marked by memorials and annual ceremonies, and useful to a deepening strategic partnership.
• Palestinian: the campaign read as a stage in foreign domination, since British control enabled the Balfour Declaration's implementation. The Palestinian Ambassador's formulation to Indian commemorators is blunt: "We did not ask you to liberate us" — a challenge to the framing, not to the soldiers' courage.
• The historiographical dispute: some Israeli scholars credit British and Australian units with the decisive role; Indian military historians point to British war diaries crediting the Indian cavalry. The column reads both positions as shaped by present-day identity rather than evidence alone.

• India's traditional position has supported a negotiated two-state solution with a sovereign, viable Palestine, alongside a full diplomatic and strategic relationship with Israel since 1992 — the "de-hyphenation" approach.
• Commemorative diplomacy — visits to war memorials, renamed landmarks, joint ceremonies — is low-cost signalling, but as this case shows it is not cost-free where a third party reads the same event differently.

The column argues that deaths from collapsing structures, illegal hoardings and unsafe premises are not accidents but the predictable output of a system in which enforcement is selective, officials face no personal consequence, and public memory is short.

• Connivance, not oversight. Illegal structures survive because officials know and permit them; that knowledge is what emboldens violators.
• Symmetrical liability. An official who clears or knowingly ignores an unauthorised structure should face the same consequence as the owner who built it.
• Planning failure compounds population pressure. Unauthorised colonies that sit outside planning regulation amount, in the writer's phrase, to sanctioned impunity — and encroachment on public land is as common in affluent areas as in informal ones.
• Selective enforcement is not enforcement. Anti-encroachment drives aimed largely at groups unable to resist both fail the norm and legitimise other classes of violation.

• Personal liability for officials who sanction or ignore unauthorised construction, on par with the owner's.
• Uniform anti-encroachment action across income groups, so that enforcement is credible rather than performative.
• Information as an enforcement tool: compliance certificates displayed at premises and a public registry of violations, so consumers can make informed choices.
• Consumer pressure: the writer points to boycott movements abroad affecting large chains, and argues Indian consumers could similarly withdraw patronage from establishments whose violations have cost lives.
• Sustained monitoring of the kind applied during the COVID-19 pandemic, when deviation from operating norms brought immediate closure.

• Capacity, not only will. Municipal bodies are chronically short of engineers, inspectors and own-source revenue; the 74th Amendment devolved functions far more completely than funds or functionaries.
• Criminal liability can freeze decisions. Personal exposure without procedural protection tends to produce refusal to decide rather than better decisions — the argument behind Section 197 CrPC-type sanctions and, now, the corresponding provision of the BNSS.
• Regularisation cuts both ways. Periodic amnesty for unauthorised colonies protects residents with no alternative housing while signalling that violations will eventually be legalised.
• Demolition as due process. The Supreme Court in 2024 laid down nationwide guidelines requiring notice and hearing before demolition, underlining that enforcement must not itself become punitive and arbitrary.
• Consumer boycott is a weak substitute for regulation where the market is fragmented and information asymmetric — which is why the registry proposal matters more than the boycott one.