Gurdip Singh Chaggar

Gurdip Singh Chaggar was an eighteen-year-old Sikh engineering student who was stabbed to death in Southall, west London, on the night of Friday 4 June 1976. Benjamin Bland, writing in Discover Society, says he was on a quiet night out with friends when a gang of white youths attacked him, and calls the attack unprovoked. Bland treats his killing as the background to the events of April 1979 in Southall.

Key moments

• 5 to 7 June 1976: hundreds of local Asians protested over the weekend, and by the Monday the Southall Youth Movement had formed, wanting direct action. Its co-founder Balraj Purewal is quoted by Bland as saying that nobody was going to listen.
• 7 June 1976: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Sewell told the Evening Standard that the whole affair had been carried away on a wave of mass hysteria and called talk of racial undertones nonsense. Bland argues that police and judiciary dismissed the possibility of a racist murder.
• 12 June 1976: John Kingsley Read, a former National Front leader and then a National Party councillor from Blackburn, told a meeting in Newham: "One down, a million to go". In January 1978 he was found not guilty of inciting racial hatred over the remark.
• May 1977: two white teenagers, 17 and 18, were found guilty of killing him. Both admitted manslaughter but pleaded not guilty to murder, and each was jailed for four years. Judge Neil Lawson stressed his belief that the attack had no racial motivation.
• 23 April 1979: the Southall Youth Movement opposed the National Front's election meeting at Southall Town Hall, the day Blair Peach was killed. Bland notes that, unlike in Chaggar's case, no one stood trial for Peach's death.

Remembered for: the murder after which Southall's young Asians formed the Southall Youth Movement.