The Monitoring Group Collective
The Monitoring Group is in a period of organisational transition reflecting a more collective approach to strategic thinking, decision-making and responsibility sharing. Members of the Collective include Trustees, Volunteers and Staff and demonstrate a rich mix of pioneers and emerging talented leaders in their field of work. From 1st September 2020, the role of the Director is being shared for the first time in the history of the group. More job sharing roles and new members will be announced over the coming year.
Abisola Babarinde
Abisola Babarinde works in innovation in the legal profession. Abisola has been involved with The Monitoring Group when she first volunteered in 2016, during the flare-up of post-Brexit racism. She is a graduate of Law with Humanities (BA) from the University of Warwick with a passion for social justice and activism. During her time at university, she co-founded and led the collective ‘Let’s Talk Black’, which educated the student body about racial injustice and worked with staff to decolonise the curriculum.
Dr Adam Elliot Cooper
Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper was born in London and resides in the capital. He is a research associate in sociology, at Greenwich University. He has worked with a number of anti-racist organisations including London Campaign Against Police and State Violence.
His book titled Black Resistance to British Policing will be published by Manchester University Press in spring 2021.
Amidou Njie: Treasurer
He is a senior finance professional experienced at working with executive and senior management teams on change management, improving business processes, guiding organisations to achieve corporate and financial objectives.
Amidou says, "I get a sense of fulfilment working with communities by serving a diverse range of people with differing needs. Working as part of the TMG is incredibly fulfilling and rewarding as we strive to bring about change and help improve lives in the midst of the significant challenges”.
Dr Amit Mukerjee
Dr Amit Mukherjee is a Consultant Psychiatrist with an experience of working 14 years in mental health services in the UK. He has a keen interest in teaching and has developed online module to teach medical ethics to international medical students. He has participated in various trade union activities within the NHS, including representing junior doctors.
Amit has been volunteering with The Monitoring Group on it’s various campaigns since 2015. More recently he has been actively involved in social media management of The Monitoring Group campaigns such as Southall Resists 40, Save Tudor Rose and Justice for Christopher Kapessa. He is also an active supporter of the local Save The Ealing Hospital Campaign.
Jagdish Patel
Jagdish is currently a PhD candidate at Coventry University examining the inter-relationship between anti-racism and socially engaged art. He spent his early career working with homeless people in central London. His joined TMG in 1992 and was the Deputy Director from 1999 until 2009.
Since 2009 he has been working as a photography based artist and researcher. He has shown work across the country including at the South Bank centre, Wolverhampton Art gallery, and the New Art Exchange in Nottingham. His work is based in communities, and involves weaving historical archives into the present. He is one of the founders of the ReFramed Network, a network for Black and Asian photographers across the Midlands, and the Off Centre : the Nottingham centre for Photography and Social Engagement.
In 2016 he worked with Suresh Grover on a publication called ‘Coming of Age’. This publication charted the history of anti-racism from 1900 to 1976, and the birth of the Asian Youth Movement. He is currently leading a project for TMG on the second part of the story from 1976 to 2020.
Jasbinder S Nijjar
Jasbinder S. Nijjar is a PhD student at Brunel University London. He is currently examining the relationship between institutional racism and the militarization of policing in London, but also has a broader interest in state racism, violence and social justice.
Jas is a member of the council of management for the Institute of Race Relations and has written articles for academic and activist journals including Race & Class, Social Justice and Popular Communication. Additionally, Jas is involved in grassroots anti-racist activism in Southall. He is a member of the Southall Resists Forum, and worked on the Southall Resists 40 project, which was a community-led initiative that organised a series of events in Southall, west London to mark the fortieth anniversary of the police killing of anti-fascist activist, Blair Peach
Professor Jawed Sidiqi: Chair of Trustees
Professor Jawed Sidiqi was born in Karachi Pakistan. His paternal side of the family resided near the Taj Mahal in United Province region in India from where they migrated after the partition. His maternal family originated from Afghanistan settling in Karachi. Jawed’s mother died when he was only one year old and his father migrated to the UK in early 1960 and Jawed soon followed him that year.
They both lived in Stoke-on Trent and were among the early migrants there. In arriving in Stoke he saw that the Asian Community was primarily men with very few women and virtually no children.
Prof Siddiqi is the Emeritus, retired, Professor of Software Engineering at Sheffield Hallam University. In his professional capacity was nationally recognised for his leadership having served as the President of the National Council of University Professors and on the executive committee of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing.
Jawed is a political activist focusing on anti-racist activities for over four decades. In the eighties in Stoke-on Trent, he was an active member of North Staffordshire Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. He was a founding member the North Staffordshire and Surrounding Districts Community Relations Council (CRC later REC) and served as its Chair for several years which involved working with BME communities and individuals who experienced racial harassment and discrimination. In the nineties in Sheffield he was Secretary of the Black Justice Project and Chair of the Sheffield Action Against Racial Harassment Project working with young Black and Asian men facing racial attacks and often being arrested for defending themselves. He led a successful campaign, involving a group of young Asian men from Darnall who were arrested for countering a march by BNP members, that resulted in all charges being dropped.
Jo Harris
Jo Harris is a London based casting director who is committed to the promotion of social justice, equality and proportionate representation for members of marginalised communities. Jo encountered The Monitoring Group through her support of the End Stop and Search Campaign, and is proud to be able to assist in it’s essential work challenging racist policing and race-based hate crimes, whilst also championing diversity in the film and television industries through her work in casting.
Jo Harris is a London based casting director who is committed to the promotion of social justice, equality and proportionate representation for members of marginalised communities. Jo encountered The Monitoring Group through her support of the End Stop and Search Campaign, and is proud to be able to assist in it’s essential work challenging racist policing and race-based hate crimes, whilst also championing diversity in the film and television industries through her work in casting.
Leslie Lee
Leslie Lee is a New York-born, London-based producer/director who works in documentary and factual TV .Her credits range from true crime to food: Working With Weinstein (Channel Four, shortlist Grierson Awards 2018), Nothing Personal (Investigation Discovery), Paranormal
Witness (Syfy), How Do They Do It? (Discovery), Why Don't You Speak English? (Channel Four) and The Best of British Takeaways (BBC2). She is also a former print journalist and longtime volunteer at the Central London Law Centre.
Mairead Grenhill
Mairead Greenhill recently graduated from the University of Nottingham where she studied History and American Studies, spending a year abroad at a university in Canada. Whilst completing her degree she initially volunteered with the law departments refugee scheme that supported refugees within the community to overcome bureaucratic issues to grant government aid and status. In her final year her volunteering role concentrated on more specialised work, assisting female refugees to develop their English. This further developed her interest in international gender dynamics, which influenced her concentration on gender mistreatment and injustice and in particular investigating the morality concept presented by the Bush administration in the 2001 Afghanistan war, which suggested that the War on Terror was intersectional with the liberation of Afghan women by the American government in partnership with American feminists.
Since then, Mairead has been working in a London primary school as a teaching assistant and began volunteering with The Monitoring Group in 2020 during the pandemic where she combined her support for social justice with her awareness of the increasing presence of discrimination and injustice during lockdown worldwide.
Nandini Mitra
Nandini is a proud volunteer for The Monitoring Group. She is committed to supporting all individuals and communities who are marginalised by the state. Having previously worked and volunteered in Parliament and the migrants' rights sector, she now works in public law.
Nandini maintains keen interests in justice actions for Black, brown, racialised and working-class communities, particularly where such actions intersect with immigration, asylum and nationality matters and/or economic and welfare issues
Suresh Grover: Founder and National Coordinator
Suresh has been a leading anti-racist advocate and campaigner in the UK for over four decades.
Born in Kenya, East Africa, he 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 moved to live 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 back 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 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.
Suresh is acknowledged as a strong advocate for victimised and marginalised communities and brings a formidable reputation for campaigning against race, gender, caste and class discrimination, state misconduct, communal violence and environmental destruction in the UK and the global South.
Suresh has been a central part of every single campaign – totally hundreds - supported or established by the group.
Some of the notable campaigns (both family justice and community defence campaigns) include:
Gurdip S Chaggar (Southall, 1976), Blair Peach (Southall, 1979), Bradford 12 Campaign (1981), Bhopal Gas Disaster (India, 1984), Trilokpuri Massacre (Delhi, India 1984), Kuldip Singh Sekhon (Southall, 1988), Stephen Lawrence (London, 1993), Michael Menson (London, 1997), Ricky Reel (Kingston, 1997), Spencer Weston (Leicester, 1999), Victoria Climbie (London, 2000), Zahid Mubarak (Feltham YOI, 2000), Dover 58 Chinese Migrants (Dover, 2000), Harold & Jason McGowan (Telford, 2000), Sakil & Saeed Dawood (Gujarat, India, 2002), Amarjit & Nancy Chohan and the whole family (Hounslow, 2003), Mi Gao Hung Chen (Wigan, 2005), Xiao Mei Guo (London, 2007), Rotherham 12 Defence Campaign (2015), Christopher Kapessa (South Wales 2019), Free Siyanda (Mid Wales, 2020) and Justice for Alison Wilson Shaw (Stoke on Trent, 2020)
The campaigns around Stephen Lawrence, Victoria Climbie and Zahid Mubarek led to the establishment of Public Judicial Inquiries resulting in positive changes in legislation, policies and practices.
Both Suresh and The Monitoring Group have been granted core participant status by the Undercover Police Inquiry (UCPI). The UCPI was established by the previous Home Secretary (and later Prime Minister) Theresa May MP to examine illegal police spying of peaceful campaigning & protest groups.
The Guardian (UK) Newspaper has named him as one of the hundred most influential people in Social Policy in the UK.
You can contact Suresh Grover via email: sgrover@tmg-uk.org