She writes that it's a "thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe." Umm... there was a heroic retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe, involving hundreds of thousands of plucky Brits. So?
Look the articles on this "they ignored the Indians" issue rather short on details as to how many were actually at Dunkirk or France in general. There were four mule companies and their handlers. A company has about 100 to 250 men, generally speaking, so unless someone has a more specific number, we're talking 1,000 Indians and 2500 mules. There were 338,226 men that escaped, including 139,997 French, Polish, and Belgian troops, together with a small number of Dutch soldiers, aboard 861 vessels (of which 243 were sunk during the operation). Almost all of the remainder were British. It was a large chunk of the British army.
There were, of course, other troops stationed in France, but this is small number.
If you click through a few articles on this topic, you'll notice one thing. They all talk about how the Indians or whoever were ignored at Dunkirk, and then they'll quote the statistic that so many millions of "Commonwealth" soldiers fought in WW2. But what they don't specify is how many were stationed in France and were part of the evacuation at Dunkirk. My suspicion is that the numbers are in the few thousand Indian, African and Caribbean troops, and that while the contribution of Commonwealth forces to World War 2 was material and significant, their involvement in Dunkirk, specifically, was fairly limited.
What one might expect to find in an article like the Guardian piece is "Nolan ignored the contribution of Indians, where the Indian army had stationed 50,000 troops, some of which died and some of which were evacuated at Dunkirk...." -- but, instead they say to the effect of "Nolan ignored the contribution of Indians at Dunkirk, because millions of Commonwealth soldiers fought all over the world throughout WW2."
Let's face it. It was mainly a British miracle. Secondarily a French miracle. The rest of the numbers descend in significance. The article talks about certain groups who must have participated significantly in Dunkirk, but that does not mean they were among the troops being evacuated. The numbers are out there, and the vast majority of the British troops evacuated were white. The vast majority of the French troops were white. I think the reason the articles don't provide very much specificity in numbers is that the numbers of Indians and Africans are fairly small, in relation to the total number of participants.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar