Ismail Ahmed Cachalia

Molvi Ismail Ahmed Cachalia was born in the then Transvaal Province (now Gauteng) of South Africa on 5 December 1908. At the time Cachalia’s father, who was the chairman of the British Indian Association, was in prison because of his involvement in the first passive resistance campaign led by MK Gandhi. Cachalia attended the Bree Street Indian School in Johannesburg and after completing standard five - at the age of 16 in 1924- he went to study at the Muslim Theological college in Deoband India. In the late 1930s, with Dr Dadoo, Cachalia was instrumental in mobilising young activists within the Indian community in the Transvaal around a programme of militant mass action to oppose discrimination against Indians and to forge co-operation with other militant political organisations amongst African, Coloured and White in the fight for equal rights. In 1931 he returned to Johannesburg, where he became a business partner of his younger brother Yusuf. In the early 1947 he led a batch of 30 volunteers who deliberately broke the law and spent three weeks in prison Durban.

Molvi Cachalia was one of the key figures in the 1946-1947 Indian passive resistance campaign. This campaign and the African mineworkers' strike were both held in the same year and were turning points in the history of resistance. The Indian passive resistance campaign led to the formal forging of a political alliance between the Indian and African National Congress.

In 1952 Cachalia was Deputy Volunteer-in-Chief to Nelson Mandela in the 1952 Defiance Campaign. In 1954 he was issued a banning order and was forced to resign as an official of the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC). In 1955, Cachalia and Moses Kotane (leader of the A.N.C. and Chairperson of the outlawed South African Communist Party) left South Africa illegally to represent the liberation movement at the historic Asian-African Bundung Conference. In the same year, Cachalia was awarded the World Peace Council Award.

After the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, Cachalia was one of the thousands of democrats arrested as part of the state of emergency. In 1961 as one of the Congress Alliance leaders, Cachalia attended secret meetings with Chief Albert Luthuli to decide on their support of the move to armed struggle. In 1964 Cachalia and Dan Tloome (ANC stalwart and the head of the Transvaal Command of uMkhonto we Sizwe [MK]) fled to Botswana to set up an ANC mission. In 1966 Cachalia moved to Delhi and established the African National Congress (ANC) mission in India with Alfred Nzo. In 1972, due to ill health, Cachalia was forced to retire from active politics and he went to live in his ancestral village of Kala Kacha outside the south Gugurat city of Navsari, India. In 1977 Cachalia was honored with the Padma Shri, India's highest award. With the unbanning of the liberation movements, he returned to South Africa in 1990 after 26 years in exile. In the country's first democratic elections in1994 Cachalia was asked by the ANC to become part of its election campaign. Molvi Ismail Ahmed Cachalia passed away on 8 August 2003.