Pranlal Sheth: Equal rights activist who worked with fifty different campaign groups

Tuesday 22nd July 2003
The Times, UK

PRANLAL SHETH was a campaigner for equal rights in his native Kenya, and then in Britain, his adopted home, for more than 30 years. He was a deputy chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality from 1977 to 1980, and in all he served more than fifty organisations committed to charitable and humanitarian causes. To all of this work he brought a wide repertoire of skills — and his contacts from journalism, law and the City.

It was a life of contrasts. In 1950, while editor of a Kenyan daily newspaper championing African independence, he was charged with sedition against the British Crown. Forty-six years later, he was appointed CBE by the Queen. He was a founder of the first Kenyan Trades Union Congress, which was banned by the colonial government as a “subversive” organisation. In the 1980s he was probably the highest-ranking Asian in the City of London. But his was not the story of a colonial radical who gave up his youthful ideals to gain access to the ranks of Britain’s great and good. On the contrary, it was the ideals of the British Establishment that shifted.

When Kenya’s limited press freedom was extinguished in the wake of the Mau Mau emergency, Sheth 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. He practised in Kisumu and was close to the Luo leader, Oginga Odinga, who called for African independence and the release of Jomo Kenyatta from internal exile.

When independence came, somewhat unexpectedly, in 1963, Sheth helped to draft the new Constitution, and was appointed to commissions responsible for agricultural, economic and broadcasting policies. He also chaired a commission on tribal riots. He became a victim of the rift between Kenyatta and Odinga, however, and was arrested and deprived of his citizenship by presidential decree. Allowed no judicial appeal, he was put on a plane to India in 1966.

He was admitted to Britain later that year to take up permanent residence, and was soon joined by his wife and young family. Unable to obtain employment as a lawyer, he joined Abbey Life, then one of the largest insurance companies in Britain, as a junior clerk. Within ten years he was company secretary and a member of the board of directors.

In his work in the City he strove ceaselessly to make business shoulder its public service obligations. Such considerations guided his contributions to the formulation of the Insurance Companies and the Financial Services Acts. They also led him to pioneer an ethical unit trust, and for many years he chaired the independent committee supervising its selection of equities.

With substantial immigration, first of Afro-Caribbeans in the 1950s and then of Asians in the 1960s, race relations had moved to the forefront of public attention. Sheth was asked to serve on the conciliation committee of the Race Relations Board, and his criticism of its limitations was taken into account in the enhanced powers granted to the Commission for Racial Equality when it was created. In 1970 Sheth was appointed the commission’s deputy chairman, and as chairman of its legal committee he bore primary responsibility for mounting strategic test cases. He also helped to draft the Race Relations Act of 1976. However, his term at the commission was not renewed by the Thatcher Government.

Sheth was convinced that, although a legal framework was indispensable for dealing with flagrant discrimination, much broader action and education was needed to transform attitudes. The rest of his life, both during his busy career as an insurance executive and after his retirement, was devoted to that aim.

He held offices in organisations concerned with immigration (such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the Immigrants Aid Trust); housing (Notting Hill Housing Trust); employment (Project FullEmploy and the Windsor Trust); business (Asian Business Initiatives); the media (as founder and first editor of the weekly Gujarat Samachar for an estimated 600,000 Gujarati speakers); and education (spending ten years as governor of the University of North London, where 40 per cent of students are from ethnic minorities).

Sheth also fostered interaction among communities through the performing arts (at the Roundhouse Arts Centre and through Pan Projects) and research and policy initiatives on stereotyping (such as the Runnymede Commissions on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia). He was one of the founders of the Indian- Jewish Association.

Sheth was appointed to the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1990. During his five years there he helped to develop the framework which became the basis for a new Broadcasting Act.

His colonial background made him very conscious of the international role Britain had to play to help the disadvantaged globally, not only through emergency aid but by enabling them to overcome their own problems. He worked for the Oxfam “Find Your Feet” project, supporting initiatives for the alleviation of poverty in Africa, India and Latin America. He was a trustee of Sense UK, which helps deaf and blind people and rubella victims throughout the world. He also chaired Womankind Worldwide, which aims to secure and safeguard rights for women in the Third World.

In recent years he had been particularly active in One World Broadcasting Trust as a trustee, and as a director of its subsidiary, One World Online, maintaining a continually updated internet service on issues of human rights, social justice and the environment.

Pranlal Sheth is survived by his wife, Indumati, whom he married in 1951, and by their son and daughter.

Pranlal Sheth, CBE, campaigner for equality and human rights, was born on December 20, 1934. He died of cancer on June 30, 2003, aged 68.