When Balwinder Singh Rana, along with about 50 members of the newly formed Indian Youth Federation, entered a pub in Gravesend in 1969 after their inaugural meeting, it was their first collective moment of local activism.
“There was this pub not far from the meeting hall, which did not serve our people,” he said. “If people went in there, they would just ignore and say: ‘Get out, you black bastard.’”
Nevertheless, Rana defiantly demanded 50 pints of lager from staff, who quickly obliged. “My friends, the 50 of them, were all smiling, laughing and joking. The first time they have ever seen their power,” he said.
Rana had arrived in the UK in 1963, aged 16, from Punjab, India, during a decade that witnessed the birth of the far-right National Front and a spate of racist attacks across the UK. In 1968, Enoch Powell delivered his infamous “rivers of blood” speech, widely condemned as being one of Britain’s most inflammatory and divisive addresses.
Those events spurred Rana on to form the Indian Youth Federation, thought to be the country’s first Asian youth movement.
Their action in the Gravesend pub was just one of several incidents of discrimination and defiance that form part of Rana’s decades-long struggle against racism and the far right, with the activist travelling across the country as a member of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s. “Before I came here, I had no idea that people were having to face racism here,” he said. “After just two weeks I saw it for myself.”
Rana said the current spate of violence in the UK, with riots spreading across parts of the country after three children were killed in an attack in Southport last week, was “totally unprecedented”. “I’ve never ever seen this situation before in the last 55 years. I’ve been fighting against racism, fascism; it’s never happened at this scale,” Rana said. “The level of violence, they’re doing this day after day.”
Mukhtar Dar, 62, is another prominent member of youth movements that confronted the far right in the second half of the 20th century. He is one of the founding members of the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement (SAYM), and described the recent far-right riots as “very concerning” but disagreed they were unprecedented.
“It’s very concerning, and the fact that they’re calling for regular upcoming demonstrations in the hearts of our communities, it echoes some of the things that we went through, but there are major differences between what happened then and what is taking place now,” he said.
Dar, now the artistic director of the Birmingham arts foundation Kalaboration, co-founded the SAYM in response to an attack on a local restaurant. “That attack was not unique to Sheffield; the attacks were happening up and down the country,” he said.
Rana said of the anti-racist movements in the 1970s and 80s: “We learned that you have to stop the fascists from marching. You can’t march away from them because they believe that whoever controls the streets can control the state.”
Dar added: “The lesson from the 80s is that you have to challenge the far right on the street. You can’t allow our streets to relinquish to them.”
Matloub Husayn Ali Khan, 66, another co-founder of the SAYM, recalled threats being made to local mosques during the 70s. “We were always afraid of the National Front attacking the mosques,” he said. “My mum and dad used to say: ‘Stay away from the NF.’
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“That fear was there at that time. But now it’s the same, history repeating itself, but it’s a different lot. People organise a lot better and that’s the same with the far right. They are organising misinformation … That is the problem with social media.”
Dar said of the riots over the past week: “There are a lot more nuances, so what you have is a toxic mix of nationalism, patriotism, scapegoating Muslims, scapegoating migrants. People that are disillusioned, that don’t see their voices being heard, that are buying into the far-right narrative – we really need to be able to counteract those arguments.”
He added: “We know we won [against] the fascists before. They offer no hope; they offer no solution; they offer destruction and divisions.”
Both Dar and Rana urged communities to rally together but to do so peacefully and responsibly. “We need to present hope to our young people. We need to present an alternative of people coming together and why diversity is important,” Dar said.
As more rallies are being organised across the UK this week, with the far-right planning to target immigration centres, the campaigners view their anti-racism activism as far from over.
Khan, who attended a counter-protest against the far-right riots in Sheffield on the weekend, said it was “important” to show solidarity to affected communities. “We, as black migrants, suffered from racism and the asylum seekers are being treated as easy targets for the far right,” he said. “We don’t want to let the far right get away with it without being opposed.”