The South Asian Working Class

Just as Britain’s mining communities were built around industry, South Asian communities were built around the factories, mills, and foundries that sought their labour after the Second World War. South Asians began to arrive in large numbers in post-war Britain to fill the shortages in undesirable manual jobs. It didn’t take long for them to find their collective political identity as a distinct section of the working class in Britain.

In a pamphlet published in 1983, the Race Today Collective highlighted this process:

The ghettoisation of labour meant that the school teacher from Ludhiana, the mechanic from Hoshiarpur, the graduate from Punjab University, the illiterate middle peasant from a village in Azad Kashmir … [all] found themselves on the same shop floor. Britain recognised no distinctions of class or qualification amongst the Asians whose labour it used.

Pay was low, hours were long, and conditions were grim. The first arrivals were often men who sought to send remittances to their wives and children in the Indian subcontinent. They lived in overcrowded houses, often taking turns to sleep on the few mattresses they were able to fit inside them. A battle for dignity in the workplace would have to be fought not by choice but by necessity.

The Indian Workers’ Association (IWA), established in Coventry in 1938, saw its numbers surge in this period. By the 1960s, almost half of the Punjabis in many areas of Britain were members. The struggle was waged not just on the factory floor but on the streets, where members confronted the fascists who sought to terrorise them, in the pubs and clubs that sought to exclude them, and against the apparatus of the state — from the immigration officers to the police officers — who sought to criminalise them.

There was also a struggle in the trade union movement itself, which failed to back South Asian workers at certain key points. In workplaces where South Asian workers were segregated and confined to areas with the worst conditions, anger was directed at both white supervisors and white shop stewards, who both exerted power over them.

In a period of heightened industrial militancy in the 1970s. Leading figures who were members of both the IWA and the Communist Party came to enjoy greater prominence in the wider movement. The British Asian community itself expanded, too. The strike at Mansfield Hosiery Mill in 1972, at Imperial Typewriters in 1974, and at Grunwick in 1978 primarily involved African Asians, many of whom were recent arrivals and not embedded in the Punjabi-dominated IWAs. They pressed ahead regardless, demanding, above all else, to be treated with basic decency and respect by bosses and union officials alike.

The dispute at the Grunwick film processing factory in Willesden, in particular, differed from earlier disputes in the extent to which it attracted support from across the labour movement. Tens of thousands of miners, dockers, electricians, postal workers, and other workers from across the country marched in support of the women on strike, and the police presence on the picket line was predictably vicious: over 550 trade unionists were arrested during the dispute, including Arthur Scargill.

Dar describes Grunwick as a pivotal movement. ‘We watched films of the strike at Asian Youth Movement day schools. As soon as the miners arrived by the coachloads the atmosphere changed. The police took a step back and the miners swelled the ranks.’

A year after Grunwick, Birmingham Trades Council elected Maurice Ludmer as its new president. Ludmer was a Jewish anti-fascist who worked closely with Jagmohan Joshi and the IWA in fighting the colour bar, and racist discrimination in the Midlands more generally. Ludmer passed away in 1980, but he was succeeded by Paul Mackney who continued to uphold his anti-racist values.

‘The Indian Workers’ Association had a regular presence at the trades council meetings,’ recalls Mackney of that time. ‘In those days, we used to get meetings of up to and even over 200 people.’ Mackney’s partner served as secretary of the Birmingham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism — a broad coalition that included the Birmingham Trades Union Congress (TUC), the IWA, the Bangladeshi Workers’ Association, and several African and Caribbean organisations across Birmingham. The group organised numerous counterdemonstrations against the far-right National Front and forged closer ties between trade unions and ethnic minority communities. These ties were to prove crucial over the next few years.

Scargill’s South Asian Army

The IWA had backed the miners when they went on strike in the 1970s. When they went out again in 1984, support remained steadfast, as the money and food raised in collections made evident.

Mackney recalls of that year:

I can remember Avtar Singh Jouhl, president of the Indian Workers’ Association, and some mates walking into the Sparkhill Labour Club every Wednesday night. They’d collect food donations from all over the city and a significant sum of money — £2,000 or so every week — would come into the Labour Club.

The funds and food would then be divvied up and sent to miners across the Midlands and South Wales.

In his 1987 book Birmingham and the Miners’ Strike: The Story of a Solidarity Movement, Mackney interviewed several miners and local trade unionists about their recollections. Eric Lippitt of Lea Hall Colliery in Staffordshire recalled support from South Asian communities in Wolverhampton and Walsall. ‘We went to this shop run by an Indian bloke. He’d been robbed the night before and yet he gave us food. That was what we call support. I thought it was fantastic.’ Nigel Ashfield from the same pit spoke at an IWA meeting in Leamington, which raised over £400.

On Friday and Saturday nights, miners’ wives from Littleton and Lea Hall would go round the Wolverhampton pubs with Kamaljit Singh and other IWA members. ‘That’s fairly extraordinary if you think about it,’ says Mackney. ‘Miners from Mid Staffordshire going to Wolverhampton to collect money at Desi pubs.’

Mackney explains that black and Asian communities were often the most generous when it came to collecting for the miners facing poverty in their year on strike. Street collections on Soho Road in Handsworth, a deprived area with a significant number of black and Asian residents, were known to be among the best supporters, and miners often squabbled over who got that ‘patch’. Miners who conducted fundraising down Petticoat Lane market in East London made similar observations about Indian stall holders.

It was estimated that well over £5,000 was collected at the city’s Sikh temples, too, most of it going to the Birch Coppice Hardship Fund. In May, Baba Bakhtaura Singh, a well-known and much-loved Punjabi folk singer then fighting the state’s efforts to deport him, performed at one of Birmingham’s first miners’ support benefits.

Nigel Flanagan, who grew up in the Harehills area of Leeds, has similar recollections. Many of his friends worked at the nearby Allerton Bywater pit and in the Selby ‘super mines’ just outside Leeds. He recalls going door to door in the Harehills area alongside others in the East Leeds Miners’ Support Group, giving out bin bags and telling residents that they would return the next day to collect the bags hopefully loaded up with food. The food would then be distributed to strikers’ families living in Harehills or Gipton. If any was left over, it would be taken to the Allerton Bywater pit.

‘It became very clear that the households that contributed the most and on a regular basis were in the South Asian communities,’ says Flanagan. ‘They also encouraged us to ask the numerous corner shops for donations, which we did. By the end of the strike a lot of the food collectors like myself had ‘regulars’ who would chat and ask about the strike. A few times we took some strikers with us to talk to people just as a thank-you exercise.’

As well as giving donations, people travelled the distance between the cities and the pit downs. Denis Doody, who grew up in Fitzwilliam in West Yorkshire and still lives there, recalls the IWA visiting his village in 1984. ‘Most of them were members of the Communist Party,’ he says. ‘Mick McGahey came with them. They brought two or three van loads of food and toys and everything over, and they came into one of the clubs in the village.’ Doody recounts IWA visits to neighbouring villages, too. ‘It was quite a culture shock for some people in overwhelmingly white areas, but the people were overwhelmed by the generosity.’

Doody also recalls the solidarity of Indian construction workers, Kashmiri taxi drivers, and local mosques across West Yorkshire who raised money. In particular, he recalls the solidarity of a Pakistani friend, Abdul, who opened up his social club and helped facilitate local NUM meetings. ‘He did a hell of a lot of solidarity work for the community,’ Doody says. ‘The Kashmiri community [was] very good to us. Ordinary people. The Pakistani Workers’ Association [that was] mainly based around Yorkshire [was] also very supportive and did a lot of fundraising.’

At other times, miners came to visit South Asian communities. Hardev Dhillon — who had arrived in the UK from India in 1963, set up a branch of the IWA in Greenwich in 1965, and forced the hand of the Transport and General Workers Union to allow 300 of his South Asian colleagues working at a factory in Woolwich to join in 1968 (which the union had initially refused) — reached out with his IWA branch to NUM branches in Kent.

‘We promised to fund them and provide food,’ he recalls. ‘When they travelled to London for demonstrations, we housed them in local houses in the area. Miners came from across the country. Some of them stayed in my home.’

Bhagwant Singh, a member of the IWA, lived in West Bromwich at the time. Through collections at local temples and gurdwaras, he managed to raise £350. He recalls inviting miners from Lea Hall Colliery for dinner at his home one night after visiting them on the picket line.

There were about fifteen of them. When we finished dinner, one of the miners hugged my wife and expressed appreciation for our support. He said ‘I have nothing on me to give you,’ but he gave her his metal Labour Party membership token. We still have it.

And then, of course, there was the vital element of picket line solidarity. Nishaharan Vaithilingam was a founding member of Black People Support the Miners, a group set up in 1984 that organised black and Asian solidarity under the banner of political blackness. He had been politicised through the anti-apartheid movement at university after offering to help design posters, and the frequent racist taunts he endured were enough to turn him into a full-fledged anti-fascist fighter, one also involved in the campaign to free the Bradford 12 in 1981.

‘Black People Support the Miners would usually meet up at the Chinese Information Centre on Shaftesbury Avenue, near Leicester Square,’ recalls Vaithilingam. ‘That was a free advice service for Chinese workers. The two people who worked there, Bobby Chan and Wabi Zeng, were involved in the campaign. We used to have people like Cecil Gutzmore and others from the African Caribbean community organising under this umbrella too.’

The group would pool their money together to hire coaches and visit picket lines in Nottingham and Wales, alongside undertaking political education efforts. Using his love of design, Vaithilingam produced a ‘Black People Support the Miners’ badge as well as informational leaflets. The group had stalls at Notting Hill Carnival, where they discussed the dispute and raised much-needed funds.

It’s these stories about fundraising that perhaps remain the best illustrations of the solidarity that normal South Asian people offered the striking miners at that time. In one particularly striking case, Vaithilingam recalls fundraising outside a Tesco alongside the anti-racist Southall Monitoring Group and Southall Black Sisters.

I remember an older Asian couple in their sixties coming out with a trolley full of their shopping. When we talked to them about the strike and explained what the miners were going through, they left the whole trolley and went inside to do the shopping all over again.

Shared Experiences

Despite the racism Sadiq witnessed the day of Orgreave, Mukhtar Dar and his comrades from the Sheffield AYM stayed to see out the battle that ensued. Six thousand police officers from eighteen different police forces, tooled up with batons, riot shields, and helmets, attacked the miners and their supporters, leaving many with serious, lifelong injuries. Dar recalls running for his life, jumping through gardens and over hedges. The state had unleashed a brutal wave of violence, the likes of which many had never seen before.

For black and Asian communities, of course, this was just the modus operandi in Britain. The police didn’t just turn a blind eye to violence, activists from ethnic minorities knew — they were often the perpetrators. During the strike and afterwards, this was what the miners and the groups across the country who backed them came to understand, a shared experience through which South Asian communities and miners were able to solidify ties of friendship. ‘It was an incredible period of upheaval,’ says Dar.

To his mind, Dar continues, joint struggles acted as a crucible for the creation of empathy, solidarity, and resistance. ‘You had the miners, you had the Irish, you had the African and Caribbean youth. Years and years of police brutality, death in custody and sus laws: it was just a tinderbox waiting to erupt.’

Flanagan and others in the East Leeds Miners’ Support Group learned a lot from their interactions with black and Asian communities during the strike. ‘Harehills and neighbouring Chapeltown had suffered from riots and police aggression from the early 1980s. The swapping of experiences of police behaviour was brought up many times.’

Friendships were formed in other ways, too, Flanagan notes. Focusing on a common cause broke down barriers in Harehills and forged a greater sense of togetherness within the community.

The atmosphere changed. You saw people out shopping who donated food, or in the park, or out and about and you’d stop and talk. You’d jokes and banter about the food donated. We rarely mixed in pubs and clubs for all sorts of cultural reasons. But I do remember, though, after the strike going out in Leeds City Centre with a group of Asian lads I had met through the food donation work.

Vaithilingam also recalls a great degree of socialising that took place during this period. On one occasion, after providing support on a picket line in Wales, black and Asian people joined miners in a pub. A Welsh miners’ wife who had once expressed racist views found herself dancing with black and Asian people.

He explains:

She was very emotional. She told us that she only read from The Sun newspaper and had a completely different image of black people. She had never come across black people socially in that way. She expressed deep regret about her views and was very happy to meet us.

On 27 June 1984, minutes from the Birmingham Trades Council highlighted a shift in attitudes among miners due both to their experience of police brutality and the solidarity shown by those who had also been on the receiving end of it.

Brothers from Lea Hall reported that … they had a greater understanding of police harassment themselves now and would always support ethnic minority groups coming up against it in future, especially as they were supporting the NUM so solidly now.

In 1985, when riots spread across Handsworth against police repression, the miners Mackney interviewed told him they understood the root cause of the unrest. ‘The miners who got involved with the Handsworth people could see it all,’ said Allen Stevenson. ‘It was obvious it had been brewing for a while. Everything led to the police.’

Eric Lippitt said of the Lea Hall strikers: ‘They recognise the problems blacks face because they met them through the strike. They said, “Well this is what unemployment, bad conditions, bad housing causes. What do they expect?’’’

Solidarity

Solidarity during this era was not a one-way street. In Birmingham, striking Asian women workers at Kewal Brothers, a sweatshop where some were paid just £1 an hour, received support from the wider trade union movement. Upon hearing that Bhagwant Singh was involved in supporting the women, Cannock miners, with barely enough money to feed their own families, hired coaches to take 150 Lea Hall and Littleton miners to the Kewal picket line. A strike spokesperson would later go up to Lea Hall, and the two groups of workers would organise joint fundraising events.

Doody suggests that support of ‘all of the workers’ was one of the defining features of the NUM under Arthur Scargill’s leadership. ‘The colours, the nationalities, were irrelevant to us. And that was the ethos within the union.’

In practice, this policy had the potential not only to turn trade unionists into stronger and more effective organisers, but also to promote an internationalist outlook. Doody explains that it was through his interactions with local Kashmiris in Yorkshire that he became aware of the struggles of Kashmiris under occupation and their struggle for self-determination — one struggle among many he continues to support.

‘I certainly looked at things as an internationalist and I still do today,’ he says. ‘We’re knocking on now, but quite a few of us miners have been attending the Palestine solidarity rallies in London and here in Yorkshire.’

For Dar, the key lesson from the dispute is that alliances are forged in struggle.

Unity is not something that happens in the abstract. It’s something that you have to fight for. It’s something that is built in struggle. It’s in struggle that we test each other, that we break down barriers, that we hold each other to account, and that we challenge each other on our prejudice and our shortcomings.

The young Asian activists were challenged as much as anyone, he adds, specifically in their assumption that every single white person was racist until they proved otherwise.

We went to the mining communities, we stayed in the halls at night with them, and when they spoke to us and we saw the anger in their eyes and the hatred that they had for the police, they just echoed what we were going through. From that came incredible, profound friendships that endured and have lasted. I will never forget sitting with the miners’ wives as they sang ‘We are women, we are strong.’ It really moved us.

Today, as society has become more atomised, communities have become more divided, and individualism has poisoned our politics, we must rediscover the culture of collectivism and coalition-building that our communities sought to build.

The writer and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan — a formidable anti-racist who did not shy away from pointing out the shortcomings of the trade union movement — once remarked upon the values and traditions that have come down to us from the working-class movement:

Loyalty, comradeship, generosity, a sense of community and a feel for internationalism, an understanding that unity has to be forged and reforged again and again and, above all, a capacity for making other people’s fights one’s own — all the great and simple things that make us human.

These were the values that our communities embodied four decades ago. Today, as Sivanandan writes, they must once again be reforged.