Pranlal Sheth: Conscientious lawyer who championed the rights of the marginalised

Piyo Rattansi
Monday July 28 2003
The Guardian, UK

For more than 30 years, Pranlal Sheth, who has died aged 78, championed Britain's ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups. He served on the north London conciliation committee of the Race Relations Board from 1973 to 1977, and his criticisms of its limitations helped lead to the enhanced powers of the new Commission for Racial Equality, of which he was a deputy chairman from 1977 to 1980.

But he had also been a significant figure in his native Kenya. When the country was on the brink of gaining independence in 1963, Pranlal, a lawyer, advised its delegation at the Lancaster House talks. He went on to help draft its new constitution. After independence, he was a member of commissions mapping the new nation's agricultural, economic and broadcasting policies.

He was also close to the Luo leader, Oginga Odinga, and by 1966 clashes between his friend and Kenya's leader Jomo Kenyatta had left him exposed. Stripped of his citizenship, Pranlal was bundled on a plane to India. Later that year he was admitted to Britain, where his wife and family soon joined him.

There were no jobs for the Kenyan lawyer, so he became a junior clerk at the Abbey Life insurance company, which had been founded by another émigré, the South African Mark Weinberg. While Weinberg left Abbey when the American company ITT bought full control of it in 1970, Pranlal stayed, becoming secretary of the Abbey group of companies in 1971, and from 1985 to 1988 a director and its legal adviser. These and his various other posts in the Abbey and ITT organisations made him at the time one of the highest-ranking Asians in the City of London. Striving to make business conscious of its obligations, from 1988 to 1996 he chaired the Abbey Life Ethical Unit Trust's advisory board.

In 1972 he founded, and was chief editor for a year, of the weekly Gujarat Samachar, for Britain's 600,000 Gujarati-speakers, and from 1979 to 2000 he was on the board of the Polytechnic, later the University, of North London - which drew 40% of its intake from the ethnic minorities.
He was a trustee of Project Full Employ (1977-89), of the Windsor Fellowship (1988-2002) and of the Immigrants Aid Trust from 1988. From 1997 onwards he was a board member of the Notting Hill Housing Trust, and from that year, too, he chaired ABI Associates Ltd (formerly Asian Business Initiatives). In 1998, Pranlal became a director of the Pan-Centre for Inter-Cultural Arts Projects.

The son of an Indian businessman, he went to Nairobi Indian High school, as did I: in his final year, he organised a strike and sent out a letter to parents when the white headmaster tore down a portrait of the Indian political leader Pandit Nehru. From 1943 onwards, Pranlal was a journalist in Nairobi, and from 1946 to 1951 edited the Daily Chronicle, which championed independence. Working under him on the newspaper, I once again observed his qualities of moral and physical courage when, in 1950, he was charged with sedition against the British crown. That year also saw the banning of the East African Trade Union Congress, Kenya's first trades union organisation, which he had helped found in 1949; the colonial government maintained that it was "communist-inspired".

With Kenya's limited press freedom well-nigh extinguished in the wake of the Mau Mau insurgency of the early 1950s, Pranlal moved from journalism into law. He qualified as a barrister, spending the last year of his studies in London, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1962. Initially, he practised in Kisumu, the Luo homeland, where his friendship with Odinga developed. Then came independence, his deportation, and his arrival in London.

While serving on the Independent Television Commission (1991-95), Pranlal helped to develop the framework which became the basis for the Broadcasting Act of 1996, and fought to ensure impartiality and quality as central to assessing franchise awards. He worked with many international aid groups, too, and he was a member of Oxfam's council in 1993-94. He was also a trustee for Find Your Feet, which has worked across three decades in southern and west Africa, on the Indian subcontinent, and in Latin America, helping people break down the barriers of poverty by building on existing community strengths.
Pranlal sought throughout to transform attitudes by applying Gandhian principles of peaceful social progress. He is survived by his wife, Indumati, a son and a daughter.

Pranlal Purshotam Sheth, corporate lawyer and campaigner, born December 20 1924; died June 30 2003