India and Nepal take part in a kabaddi championship in Faridabad. (File picture)

London, Jan. 2: The British Army is taking up kabaddi… kabaddi... kabaddi… kabaddi….

No, this isn’t a New Year’s joke.

The British Army really is adopting the ancient Indian sport because:

“Any kind of team sport encourages bonding,” according to an army source

Introduction of kabaddi might actually encourage Indians as well as Pakistanis to enlist in the British Army and see such colourful places as Basra and Helmand province

Best of all, it would teach the natives, who are getting a bit uppity about their fluke victories at cricket, a jolly good lesson by beating them at their own game. Of course, this last reason must remain top secret and classified, the Brits have ruled.

The job of coaching the British Army team has fallen to one Ashok Das, who is not at all ashamed of passing all the ancient tricks of India to his new employers.

In fact, Das hopes his British Army players will eventually form the nucleus of an English national side which could one day challenge the world — a point of view which upset desis during a tour of India by the British Army squad.

Das explained: “They said to me, ‘You are Indian, aren’t you ashamed to do this to your country?’ I said, ‘I was Indian, now I am British, I have to pay back my country. They are not winning at football, now they will win at kabaddi.’”

British reality television often takes burly men from Britain and pitches them against wrestlers from India. British and Indian kabaddi teams battling it out seems likely to feature on British television some time in the not-too-distant future.

The one drawback Das has faced is that his best players keep getting sent off on other duties. “The problem is, sometimes the players get sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.

His team was first assembled in July 2007, after Das persuaded army recruitment officers that a kabaddi team could be a powerful recruitment tool in British Asian communities.

Last year, ethnic minority representation within the British armed forces was 5.8 per cent, and the defence ministry’s goal is for that to be 8 per cent by 2013.

Colonel Paul Farrar, the deputy head of army recruiting, agreed that kabaddi was “a really good game... something the British army ought to look at seriously”.

Farrar recently met a soldier from India, recruited via the army’s foreign and Commonwealth scheme, who said kabaddi had convinced him to join up.

“It is definitely helping recruitment among British Asian communities, too,” said Farrar. “I have been in the army for 35 years and never heard of kabaddi. Perhaps in another 30 years, we will look back on these 18 months and say, ‘This was when it all started.’”

Orders to form a team landed on the desk of Second Lieutenant Nick Burdick at 14 Regiment, the Royal Artillery, in Larkhill, Wiltshire.

He though it might have been easier to recruit a team “if it had a different name, like Murderball or Bulldog”, but in the end he walked out of his office, picked up a group of soldiers and told them they were going to be in a kabaddi team.

Last summer, the team beat Italy. A return match will take place in Aldershot next month, while overtures have arrived from the Indian Border Security Force to play the British Army next year.