Balwinder Rana

1963–present

Balwinder Rana was born in Punjab, India. In 1963, aged 16, he migrated to Gravesend, Kent to join his father and brother who had migrated two years earlier. Owing to high unemployment, Rana found a job in Slough, working in a plastic mouldings factory. However, a racist altercation with his boss’s son resulted in Rana getting sacked. After a period of unemployment he secured a job as a factory foreman, where he often faced racism.

In 1966 he moved back to Gravesend to study for his A-levels. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 resulted in heightened hostility and racist attacks in Gravesend. In response, Rana and his friends Rajinder Atwal and Mohan Bhatti founded the Indian Youth Federation, the first anti-racist organization run by South Asian youths. Members included young Sikhs who were affiliated with Gravesend’s local gurdwaras and members of local sports clubs. Rana was elected as its founding president. The first major act of the Indian Youth Federation was for fifty of its members to go to a local pub where they had previously been denied entry and order drinks as a demonstration of their collective power, a tactic also adopted by Avtar Singh Jouhl when resisting racism in Smethwick. The organization was popular, and their activities included protecting South Asian families from attack and confronting the National Front at rallies. Gravesend was targeted by white supremacists, given its large Sikh population. The Indian Youth Federation’s activities also included fundraising in support of Bengali refugees who were affected by Cyclone Bhola in 1970. Its work became foundational to the Asian Youth Movement, which had branches in places such as Bradford, Sheffield and Southall.

After his A-levels, Rana moved to London where he trained as a computer programmer and obtained a high-paying job in IT. However, he left this job to join the Anti-Nazi League, which was formed in 1977 by the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was the organization’s National Asian Organizer and occupied this role full-time. Rana travelled across the country to mobilize people in marches against the National Front. His activities included sending buses full of people from Southall to London for the ‘Rock Against Racism’ concert on 30 April 1978, which 100,000 people from across the UK attended. The Anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism were responses to the growing political popularity of the National Front. Rana also helped set up the Newham Youth Movement and Bangladesh Youth Movement.

Rana was the chief steward at a large-scale march organized primarily by the Indian Workers’ Association against the National Front in Southall on 23 April 1979, in which forty organizations were represented and activists such as Suresh Grover attended. The New Zealander Blair Peach was murdered at the march by the Special Patrol Group and 700 demonstrators were arrested. This event reoriented Rana’s approach to demonstrating, as he proposed more disruptive and co-ordinated methods such as road blocking to garner further attention towards anti-racist causes.

By 1980 Rana had returned to his work in IT, although he continued campaigning against far-right groups such as the English Defence League (EDL).