Suresh Grover, National Coordinator and founder of The Monitoring Group

Born in Kenya, East Africa, Suresh arrived in the UK, as a young 11-year-old with his family, in January 1966 and they settled in Nelson, Lancashire. 

He was baptised into political and social action having suffered racist violence during the “Paki-bashing” era in Nelson, Lancashire.

He moved to London, on his own as a teenager, in the mid 1970’s and became involved in the alternative political, cultural and squatters movements thriving in the Capital at that time. 

Suresh has worked ever since he left college in a variety of jobs and professions including as a baker, BT night-time telephonist, pizza chef, postman, underground tube guard, breakfast waiter, British Rail customer relations officer and as an operating theatre technician.

He first lived in Southall in August 1975 and played a central role in the June 1976 protests following the racist murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in Southall and the emergence of Asian youth movements in inner city areas throughout the UK.  

The emergence of Black politics and civil mobilisation against racism within the Asian community coincided with seismic political upheaval in South Asia. With other political activists, Suresh founded the South Asia Socialist Forum and established the Campaign to Free Indian Political Prisoners to publicise the plight of thousands of prisoners detained during the draconian “Emergency” rules, declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, and to ensure their freedom. 

The offer of a scholarship to study architecture in India coupled with political activity proved too attractive to resist and Suresh decided to move to India in May 1978. However, the scholarship never materialised and Suresh took employment in the Bombay Docks in the informal un-unionised sector and the Dharavi Slums, where a section of the dockworkers lived.  The working conditions were harsh, hazardous, and harmful and Suresh became involved in months-long strike action to improve working and living conditions. He was made redundant by the management having being identified as one of the leaders of un-unionised workers.

He returned to the UK in April 1979, a week before the historic April anti racist mass protests against the National Front that sadly witnessed the killing of schoolteacher, Blair Peach, by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group on 23rd of that month. From that week onwards, he, alongside others, established the Southall Defence Committee, a legal campaign to defend all the 345 people charged with various criminal offences and tried in jury-less courts by special magistrates imported from the Dip lock courts in Northern Ireland and a separate campaign – Southall Campaign Committee, to examine the political consequences of the events.

In 1981, the whole of the UK witnessed civil unrest driven by the giant twins of racism and poverty. Based at Southall Rights, Suresh helped to coordinate the legal defence foe those charged during public disturbances in July 81 in Southall. 

Suresh’s personal and political relationship with some of the leadership of the Bradford Asian Youth Movement and the splinter group, United Black Youth League, led him to visit the main Bradford 12 defendants in prison and he then helped to establish the national co-ordinating committee to galvanise local and national support for the campaign.  

A rigorous examination of the Southall events and the national uprisings led to the formation of Southall Monitoring Group in 1982, although it existed as an ad-hoc group of local activists from 1981 onwards. 

Suresh started his employment as a coordinator for Southall Monitoring Group sometime in 1984 and became the Director of The Monitoring Group a decade later.