Once the NIC had settled on boycotting government institutions, it operated like a well-oiled machine. This is clearly demonstrated by the sheer number of pamphlets and letters it distributed within the Indian community to persuade potential voters to boycott the July 1979 LAC elections. Ten thousand personally addressed letters were sent to the residents of Durban warning that LACs were mere advisory bodies whose advice was ‘left on the shelves to collect dust’. This was a trial run for the main event: the campaign to delegitimise the SAIC, particularly by organising a boycott of the upcoming SAIC elections. These were originally scheduled for 26 March 1980 but were subsequently delayed until November 1981.

In July 1979, the Anti-SAIC Committee − consisting of M.J. Naidoo (president), Dr Korshed Ginwala (vice-president), Thumba Pillay and R. Ramesar (joint secretaries), Farouk Meer and Perry Pillay (joint treasurers), as well as A.H. Randeree, D.K. Singh and Marie Subramoney − circulated 9 000 copies of a newsletter named The Call. This name deliberately harked back to times past. The Call for Freedom and Justice newsletter had first been published in the 1940s by Cassim Amra. He was a member of the radical NIC faction that won hegemony under the leadership of Monty Naicker and led the NIC into an alliance with the ANC in the 1950s.

The four-page newsletter contained messages of support from Nokukhanya Luthuli, widow of Chief Albert Luthuli; Dr Nthato Motlana, chairman of the Soweto Committee of Ten; and Hassan Howa, president of the South African Council on Sport (SACOS). It also contained a critique of the SAIC by Dr A.D. Lazarus and, significantly, a contribution by Obed Kunene, editor of the Zulu newspaper Ilanga, which was aligned to Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha movement. This is important, given that relations between the NIC and Inkatha would deteriorate dramatically over the next decade.

The line-up of contributors cut across racial boundaries. Nokukhanya Luthuli, wife of the former ANC president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who was instrumental in crafting the alliance between the NIC and the ANC, was a revered figure in her own right. Motlana, a medical doctor, had emerged as an influential figure post-1976, while Hassan Howa had galvanised the anti-apartheid sports movement with the slogan ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’.