Once the official ceremony was over, the 21-year-old officer joined his relatives and friends from Nankana Sahib,the birthplace of Guru Nanak, in a spirited bhangra dance to the beat of drums.

“It is a matter of great privilege and honour for me that today I am standing in front of you in a khaki uniform. I have been given a great responsibility,” Singh said at the academy at Abbottabad in the North West Frontier Province.

“With the passage of time, I will prove that we (Sikhs) are more loyal than our Muslim brothers. I thank the Pakistan

Army that I have been given this chance,” said the cadet, who first came to the limelight in 2005, when he became the first member of Pakistan’s minority Sikh community to be recruited by the Army.

Born in 1986, Singh was part of the Pakistan Military Academy’s 116th Long Course. In December last year, he joined the first group of Pakistani women cadets to be posted for guard duties at the mausoleum of the country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in Karachi. During a visit to the mausoleum at that time, President Pervez Musharraf, also the Army chief, had said that more Sikhs would be recruited in the force in future.

Singh’s mother was initially hesitant to send him for military training. “But now she is proud of me,” he had said in an interview last year.