Viraj Mendis and Grassroots Resistance to Britain's Border Regime
By Kerry Pimblott
October 17, 2024
Authors note: This is the first in a series of blogs documenting activities emerging from the AHRC supported multi-year project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1964-1985, led by Drs Kerry Pimblott (Manchester) and Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern). Our collaboration with the Radical Reading Room is part of an effort to better document, preserve, and (re)present the history of Black Power and its legacies for local traditions of anti-racist resistance in the North West and East Midlands.
On December 20, 1986, Viraj Mendis, a Sri Lankan communist who had faced a two-year battle with the Home Office after overstaying his student visa, entered the Church of the Ascension in Hulme and took sanctuary. For the next 760 days, the church was defended around-the-clock by the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC), initiated by the Revolutionary Communist Group of which Viraj was a member and that quickly expanded to include a broad-cross section of the Hulme community and Manchester’s wider counterculture and radical political scene.
As a Sinhalese supporter of the Tamil liberation movement campaigners feared for Viraj’s safety should he be returned to Sri Lanka. But having cut his teeth in solidarity campaigns for Irish Republican hunger strikers as well as grassroots battles against racist state violence following the 1981 Moss Side Uprising and the passage of restrictive immigration laws, Viraj’s campaign always adopted a more expansive abolitionist stance captured by the dual slogans: ‘No to Death in Sri Lanka!’ and ‘Stop All Deportations Now!’
When I first visited what is now called Ascension Church Hulme back in 2021, I knew little about this history. I arrived in search of a new church home just as coronavirus restrictions on religious gatherings were lifting and a new rector, Father Azariah France-Williams, was being welcomed to the parish. Signs of the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign though scant were etched into the very fabric of the building.
A stone memorial and holy water stoup located in the lobby that in a few carefully chosen words marks Viraj’s time in sanctuary and subsequent removal and deportation to Sri Lanka.
The deep grooves in the sacristy door where officers from Greater Manchester Police and the Home Office forced entry before cutting Viraj loose from a radiator to which he had handcuffed himself and dragging him downstairs and into a police van.
A noticeboard recently recovered from the church cellar dotted with the flyers (and faces) of numerous other individuals and families who had fought their own anti-deportation campaigns in this city.
And, of course, in the stories of church elders who had attended the Church of the Ascension during the sanctuary and Father John Methuen’s tenure as priest.
Surfacing these histories has constituted an important part of our work for the last 18 months. Our partner in this project is the Radical Reading Room, an autonomous collective that is building a radical library and resource space in the Church. Their collections bring together important works on Black and feminist theology as well as local histories of anti-racist resistance. Former VMDC member, Janet Batsleer, is one of the Radical Reading Room’s founding members and among the few people to have authored a sustained account of the campaign. [1]
While historians have traced Britain’s tightening immigration system during the second half of the twentieth century much less has been said about the social history, or “history from below”, of resistance to immigration restrictions; its relationship to broader social movements, including British Black Power; or how these campaigns interacted with and shaped the manoeuvres of state actors and Britain’s evolving border regime.
Reconnecting with these genealogies of resistance is important to address this erasure and the corollary assumption that grassroots resistance was negligible or ineffective and the subsequent rise of Fortress Europe and the Hostile Environment inevitable. But it is also important because movements are built by people; people willing, often with relatively few resources and at great risk to themselves, to take on structures and agents of tremendous power in service of more just futures. Reconnecting, recognising, and wrestling with the movements they helped to build is necessary and a vital tool for grassroots activists doing the work to confront racist state violence and realise more just futures today.
With this spirit in mind, the project has focused its efforts in several key areas. First, we hosted a series of memory workshops at the Ascension Church Hulme that brought together community members, including former and current campaigners, to reflect on the VMDC campaign and wider histories of anti-racism in our neighbourhood.
We then invited former VMDC campaign members and congregants to participate in an oral history project and donate campaign materials to a new archival collection that will be made freely accessible to the public at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre in Manchester Central Library. This work is ongoing but as the project has progressed we have begun sharing findings via public events, closed-door workshops with activist groups, and in local schools. If your organisation would be interested in learning more, please do let us know by emailing: kerry.pimblott@manchester.ac.uk.
Notes:
[1] Janet Batsleer, ‘The Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign: Struggles and Experiences of Sanctuary’, Critical Social Policy, 8.22 (1988), pp. 72–79. Also see, Eddie Abrahams, ‘Citizenship and Rights : The Deportation of Viraj Mendis’, Critical Social Policy, 9.26 (1989), pp. 107–11 and Amy Grant's recent PhD, 'Strange sanctuary: state, belief and emotions in late twentieth-century Britain,' (Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia, 2023).
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