Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

VS: There was the IWA and other organisations, and in September 1967 the Joint Council for
the Welfare of Immigrants (4) was born in Southall in the Dominion Cinema. IWA was one of
the sponsors and its first conference was held there. The main task of JCWI was to provide
a free service to individuals who faced immigration difficulties – say, if at the airport, officials
say, we are not satisfied that this is your wife or these are your children. So our job was to
convince the authorities, this was his wife or his children and get all kinds of documentary
evidence. We were deeply involved in providing a personal service to victims of discriminatory
immigration policy and we used that information, based on concrete case- work, to
campaign through JCWI and groups like the IWA as a pressure group to get changes and
gradually to suggest to the government. This was great work done by JCWI, the IWA and in
the beginning West Indian Standing Conference.
This continuous work created a kind of consciousness about the discriminatory nature of the
law.
In Southall, the IWA the first body, provided facilities to other communities like the Afro-Caribbean’s
of Southall under the guidance of Jimmy Barzie to organise themselves and Pakistanis
were also encouraged to form their own organisation. There was a time in Southall
when they could not even get premises in Southall for their Eid prayers, which are very
auspicious, and we provided the hall in the Dominion Cinema to them and said, have Nawaz
here. We had very close and cordial relations between the communities.
HP: How were relations, though, with state agencies like the police?
VS: Things were bad in Southall, particularly after the 1976 incident of Chaggar’s death
[Gurdip Singh Chaggar was knifed to death on 4 June 1976 by a group of white youths,
prompting the formation of the Southall Youth Movement (5) no doubt when youth organisations
started forming here and West Indian youth had their own organisations. Park View
centre, organised and managed by West Indian youth, was continuously subject to all sorts
of attacks and all sorts of criticism by the police particularly. And no doubt the relations
between black youth and Asian and police was very strained. Relations with the police never
have been very good in Southall. (6)
HP: Relations between Southall and the state seemed to come to a head in 1979 over the
death of Blair Peach (7) and then the notorious virginity testing?
VS: The IWA began to hear rumours that the local council had given permission to the National
Front to hold one of their election meetings in the Southall town hall. So all organisations,
irrespective of their political creed, community organisations, the people from churches,
gurdwaras, West Indians, Pakistanis, all of them, their organisations were invited to a
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