My grandfather Kartar Singh Parhar, who has died aged 92, was a Royal Mail worker who became a Labour party councillor in Slough, Berkshire, in the early 1980s. He was deputy leader for a period, and mayor of Slough in 1988 and 1989, becoming the first person from a south Asian or Sikh background to hold that office.
Kartar was born in Kalra village in the Jalandhar district of Punjab in pre-partition India, as one of the seven children of Joga Singh, a farmer, and his wife, Rakhi Kaur. After secondary schooling, in the early 50s he gained a degree in politics and then a master’s in the same subject at Panjab University in Jalandhar, before spending a decade as a teacher and then travelling to the UK in 1966 at the age of 34. He brought over his wife, Amar, and four children once he had settled down in the early 70s.
