Sikhs in Bradford
Written by Dr Amardeep Singh Dhillon
Bradford has been a city of migrants for centuries. In 1851, for example, 75 percent of the population of Bradford over the age of twenty had been born elsewhere (primarily elsewhere in Britain). One hundred years later, thousands of South Asians from ex-colonised nations migrated to Yorkshire to fill the demand for labour following the second world war, and found work in mills and factories.
The increase in the Sikh population of Bradford - many of whom were men doing shiftwork and working weekends that made travelling to the nearby Gurdwara in Leeds difficult - led to the establishment of Bradford’s first Gurdwara in 1964 at 16 Garnett Street. The Gurdwara would provide a vital community space that was hardly apolitical. While Sikh identities remained distinct and important, however, in this period most Sikhs were organising through broader Indian or South Asian organisations.
During this period, a new iteration of the Indian Workers Association was set up in Bradford to organise migrant workers who often faced racism and other barriers to engaging with white trade union structures. Earlier branches of the IWA had been informally affiliated with the revolutionary anti-colonial Ghadar party, and a Bradford branch primarily consisting of Sikhs and Muslims had been active in the 1940s supporting Indian workers in avoiding conscription during the war and supporting the anti-colonial struggle for independence back home on the subcontinent. The newer branch would go on to become a significant organising force in the developing Black Power movement in Britain.
As fascist street formations escalated their activities in the 60s and 70s, political formations began to emerge to counter them. Anti-imperialist and anti-fascist, the Black Power movement included several organisations in Bradford, some of them bitterly splitting off from one another over political differences between more radical and reformist elements. In Bradford, the failure of white leftists to seriously counter a National Front march through Manningham and the dissolution of the Indian Progressive Youth Association led to the establishment of the Bradford branch of the Asian Youth Movement in the late 70s.
The Bradford branch of the AYM was the largest in the country, facilitating the setting up of other AYM branches across the country and publishing a magazine, the Kala Tara (Black Star) from 1979. It campaigned against the deportation of trade unionist Saeed Rahmon and supported a range of campaigns including the North of England Irish Prisoner’s Committee in relation to the imprisonment of Bobby Sands, the ad-hoc solidarity committee that emerged in response to the Zionist massacres at Sabra and Shatila, non-unionised workers campaigns (including at Aire Valley Yarns in Bradford) and the Anwar Ditta and Bradford 12 campaigns.
As the Asian Youth Movements declined in the 1980s, some Sikhs in Bradford began organising in solidarity with the separatist Khalistani movement and against Indian state repression of Sikh minorities and dissidents. With the rise of Hindutva in India and Britain, many South Asians began to organise against Hindu supremacy. And as the suicide epidemic of Panjabi farmers developed at the turn of the century in response to the effects of India’s neoliberal turn - with corporations developing “terminator” seeds that bankrupted farmers after a single harvest and the development of a debt crisis following the dismantling of agriculture as a protected market - Sikhs in the diaspora continued to send remittances and raised awareness of their plight.
In 2001, Bradford youth took part in heavily-criminalised anti-fascist uprisings against far-right agitators in towns across the North, colloquially known as the “Oldham Riots”. Over the next two decades, grassroots campaigns were launched by Sikh communities in support of Jagtar Singh Johal, who was abducted and tortured by Indian police in 2017 and remains detained in India, and in support of the attempted extradition of the West Midlands 3 in 2021 at the instigation of Indian authorities. Like other communities across the country, Bradford’s Sikh community contributed to these efforts. And perhaps most significantly in recent times, Sikhs all over the world campaigned in support of the Kisaan Andolan - the militant farmers’ and workers’ movement that resisted the culmination of a neoliberal project of dominance over Panjabi and Haryanvi agriculture, which successfully reversed the implementation of Modi’s Kale Kanoon, or “Black Laws”, in 2023.
There is a through-line in this disjointed history - the “Black Laws” resisted by relatives of Bradford residents in Panjab are analogous in scope to the “Black Laws” of the enclosures acts that were resisted by the Yorkshire peasantry hundreds of years ago. The contemporary fight to preserve the commons, the fight for genuine freedom of movement for ex-colonised peoples, the fight for access to public space articulated as antifascism and resistance to the disciplining and racialised effects of policing in Bradford and reactionary nationalism and privatisation on the subcontinent - these are just a snapshot of the struggles Sikh communities have been a part of. As the genocide continues apace in Palestine, as the far-right threatens further pogroms on the streets of Britain and as austerity continues to bite, we should be comforted by the knowledge that there is also resistance - there always has been, and there always will be.
