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

Back to India with dreams of revolutionary change
In 1973 I went back to Ahmedabad on a one-year sabbatical leave from my full time job
as a lecturer at the Enfield College of Technology, now Middlesex University. The idea was to
settle in India and support the emerging Naxalite movement. In Gujarat both CPI and CPI (M)
had some presence but not CPI (ML) which had only a handful of sympathisers. Prominent
among these was Kumarbhai, a sexagenarian communist from Kerala running a small trade
union of pottery workers who was in contact with one of the factions of the Naxalite movement.
I helped him run the union and also started a Slum Dwellers’ Association to protect
slums from demolition by property developers in cahoots with the police. I ended up leading
a strike by the union to get the employers to implement the minimum wage law that had
been made applicable to potteries during my stay.
It was a formative experience for me. Families of workers on strike had nothing to eat
after the first week while I continued to eat well. Some of the employers turned out to be
from the school I had attended; they tried to cajole and bribe me to suspend the strike,
failing which they reported me to the police as a Naxalite. Indira Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister
at the time, had declared Naxalites as the ‘single greatest threat to India’s security’ and
sympathisers were being rounded up, imprisoned and tortured all over India. When sympathetic
government officers let it be known to my friends that it was advisable for me to
leave so I returned to London and joined the Central London branch of the Indian Workers
Association known as IWA (GB).
In 1974 the then president of the Central London branch, Ranjana Ash, a long –standing
supporter of CPI (ML), stepped down and I was elected to the post. In 1975 I bought a house
in East London with my politically active Irish partner but instead of working with the East
London branch of the IWA (GB) continued as president of the Central London branch.
Reasons for joining the IWA (GB) in 1973
In a nutshell I joined IWA (GB) because it was run by anti-revisionist, pro-Naxalite Indian
communists. When I returned from India there were two IWAs - IWA (Southall), effectively
confined to the Southall area only, and IWA (GB) with 18 branches. (4 Both organisations
were carrying out welfare work, trade union and anti-racist activities as well as international
solidarity campaigns. But there was an important difference in the ideology of their leaders.
IWAs led by Association of Indian Communists
While all the IWA branches were mass organisations open to any Indian living in the UK,
with a total of 20,000 plus members, each one of them was set up and run by Indian communists.
On arrival in Britain they had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), a
150 | Coming of Age
Coming of Age Final version 16.10.indd 150 17/10/2017 12:08