Diwali event at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard on Thursday, November 16.
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00:00 My name is Manish Tile, I'm a Surgeon Commander, Medical Officer in the Royal Navy.
00:04 Which ship are you based on at the moment?
00:07 That's a difficult question. I'm kind of not.
00:10 So until very recently I was PMO, Principal Medical Officer here at HMS Nelson.
00:16 I'm now working mostly with the MOD's D&I team on networks policy.
00:23 So we have a number of diversity networks across Defence as well as in the single services.
00:32 But there's no actual policy guiding what we want from them as Defence, how they do
00:38 their business, to help them understand what's their remit and how they go about it.
00:43 So we're putting that policy together, so I'm part of that team.
00:46 And that's why you're here today?
00:49 No, it's not actually. Well, it's sort of linked.
00:53 So I launched the Defence Hindu Network back in 2014, so I was the first chair back then.
01:04 One of the things that I kicked off was that the network would mark two major Hindu festivals
01:11 each year. One is Raksha Bandhan, which comes in about August time.
01:16 And for that we would go out to the community and celebrate with them.
01:19 And the other being Diwali, when we invite the Hindu community into our home, so to speak.
01:27 So we hold Diwali events hosted by a different service each year.
01:31 So this year was the Navy's turn to host it.
01:35 And basically I just said that, well, what's the best place for them to do that?
01:41 It's got to be the heart of the Navy here in Portman.
01:43 And how many Hindus are there in the Navy? Do you know exactly?
01:48 So in the Navy there's about 30 to 40 Hindus. It's slightly difficult to tell.
01:56 OK.
01:57 But yeah, about 30 to 40. Across the armed forces more widely, there's actually about 3,000 Hindus.
02:06 Oh, wow.
02:07 That includes half of them are in the Gurkhas.
02:11 Naturally, yeah.
02:13 So and then of that, of the remaining 1,500, the vast majority are in the Army.
02:19 And then, like I say, about 30 or 40 in the Navy and a similar sort of number in the RAF as well.
02:26 So how long have you been in the Navy?
02:28 Almost 20 years now.
02:30 And when you joined, given how few Hindus there are in the Navy, did you feel rather isolated in that respect then?
02:38 Did you ever see anyone like you around? Who followed the same footage?
02:42 It's been an interesting journey in that sense.
02:45 So probably the most interesting bit of that journey was when I told my parents that I was going to join the Navy.
02:54 And that didn't go down in the best way, should we say.
03:02 But, you know, so my mum, her response was the usual stuff, right?
03:08 My little baby's going to go to war and it's going to be dangerous, you know, as you'd expect.
03:13 And that's every mother's right to feel that.
03:16 My dad's response was really, took me completely by surprise.
03:21 I was floored by his response.
03:23 So his response was, he didn't say anything initially.
03:25 And then he asked me to visit him at his place.
03:29 So I went round to their place and he took me upstairs and he got this box out of a wardrobe.
03:35 I'd never seen this box before. It was this wooden box about yay big.
03:40 Never seen it before.
03:42 And he put it down on the bed and he told me to open it.
03:45 I opened it up and inside was this old paperwork.
03:50 And it was an application form that he'd filled in and sent and, you know, letters of reference and all of that.
03:56 So he'd applied to join the Royal Navy back in the early 60s.
04:00 I had no idea that he'd done that.
04:03 And the response from the Navy was, they handed him back his paperwork.
04:11 And, you know, as a coloured bloke in Britain in the early 60s, they told him he needed to rethink his life choices.
04:19 So after that he went and he actually worked as a defence contractor.
04:26 He worked for Westland on the aircraft carriers.
04:29 He was on the maiden voyage of HMS Illustrious and HMS Hermes.
04:34 He ended his career recently. He retired.
04:38 He was working on the Astute class submarines and the Type 45s.
04:44 So he's had a very naval career.
04:48 One way or another.
04:49 But even that, you know, so as I say, he sailed on the maiden voyages of those ships doing the sea trials and all of that kind of stuff.
05:01 But when he sailed, you know, his colleagues who were the same grade as him, they were accommodated in the wardroom with the officers and he wasn't.
05:12 So he was accommodated with the lads.
05:15 And all of all of his experiences painted a picture of, son, you're about to join a really, really institutionally racist organisation.
05:26 And I'm really worried. Yeah, because obviously, you know, growing up in the city, Manchester in the 80s and 90s, you used to a type of racism, but not that.
05:39 So he was that's what he was worried about.
05:45 Now, that won't happen today.
05:47 Well, there are laws in place.
05:50 But that, you know, when I applied back in 2003, you know, I definitely didn't get that response from the Navy.
05:58 And so, you know, it's when I was going through Dartmouth, no, there weren't many ethnic minority personnel that I went through with who were joining the Royal Navy.
06:10 Obviously, we have international cadets as well at Dartmouth on board ship again, you know, similar sort of story.
06:17 But I've seen it changing over that time.
06:22 So when I joined.
06:23 For the better, I hope.
06:24 So, I mean, in terms of representation, you know, when I joined, it was less than 2% ethnic minority in the Navy and is now over 5%.
06:32 You know, so it's more than way more than doubled in the time that I've been in.
06:36 The fact that we've got the Defence Hindu Network and the Royal Navy Race Diversity Network, the Royal Navy Commonwealth Network, you know, and all of them doing really great work.
06:45 We've got senior leadership in the Navy are really, really forward leaning and very engaged with those networks.
06:52 networks.
06:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]