London, Driving around with hockey sticks in the boot of the car and stockpiling petrol bombs to protect themselves are among some of the accounts that make up a new UK documentary chronicling racist attacks faced by British Bharatiyas in the 1970s and 80s.
‘Defiance: Fighting the Far Right’, a three-part series aired on Channel 4 from Monday, uses a cache of archive footage and compelling new testimony from the people who were there to tell the story of the fightback of Britain’s South Asian community against a wave of brutal racist attacks and murders between 1976 and 1981.
The film highlights how the community stood in the face of a rising tide of anti-immigrant feelings and a campaign of violence and intimidation unleashed by far-right and racist groups such as the National Front.
The British Punjabi director, Rajesh Thind, one of the three episodes who grew up amid some of the upheaval in west London Back then, said ‘My Ludhiana-born father would drive around with hockey sticks in the boot of his car in case we ever ran into far-right thugs as we went about our daily business”.
He added, ‘Ever since I was a child witnessing those events of the late 1970s and early 1980s, I have wanted to tell these stories of how we British Asians fought back against the National Front and other racist and fascist organisations’.
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