How Indian-origin families helped build — and were shaped by — a city founded on exclusion
Berkeley, known today as a bastion of progressive politics, holds a more troubling origin story: it is the birthplace of exclusionary single-family zoning in the United States. In March 1916, developer Duncan McDuffie — whose firm controlled the largest real estate operation in Northern California — persuaded the Berkeley City Council to pass Ordinance No. 452, designating the Elmwood neighborhood as the nation's first single-family residential zone.
McDuffie's motivation was explicit. He had already embedded racially restrictive deed covenants reading: "…if any person of African or Mongolian descent shall be allowed to purchase or lease said property…this conveyance shall be and become void." Zoning was his mechanism to enforce segregation on land he didn't personally own.
Into this segregated city — and into its world-class public university — came waves of South Asian students and immigrants, navigating exclusion with determination. Their stories range from community-builders to convicted felons, from quiet families to nationally significant reform catalysts.
Source: Berkeley City Council Resolution, 2021 ↗Click any event to expand the full story. Sources are linked inline.
Chronicled by student journalist Girindra Mukherji in The Overland Monthly (1908), South Asian students began arriving at UC Berkeley as early as 1904. By 1907, 35 students from India, Japan, China, and Thailand founded the Oriental Students' Association of the University of California — one of the earliest Asian American student organizations on a US campus. Indian members included Girindra Mukerji and Nisha Kanta Banerjee.
These early arrivals came to an openly hostile California. The Alien Land Law (1913) prohibited Asian immigrants from owning property. Naturalization was denied entirely. Yet they enrolled, organized, and pressed back against colonialism from Berkeley's campus — with Mukherji delivering a "scathing denunciation of British misrule in India" to the UC Berkeley Economics Club in December 1907.
Source: Berkeley South Asian History Archive ↗On September 6, 1915, Kala Bagai, her husband Vaishno Das Bagai — a member of the anti-colonial Ghadar Movement — and their three young sons disembarked at San Francisco after a steamship journey from India. They were among the first South Asian families to settle in the Bay Area. Local newspapers gathered at the pier, describing them as exotic curiosities.
When the Bagai family moved into their Berkeley neighborhood, they found racist neighbors blocking their door and locking them out of their own home. Vaishno later opened a store on Fillmore Street and became an American citizen — until 1923, when the US Supreme Court stripped all South Asians of citizenship on the grounds they were not "White."
A century later, in 2020, the Berkeley City Council renamed a two-block stretch of Shattuck Avenue — the same avenue where Lakireddy Bali Reddy would later build his empire — Kala Bagai Way, honoring her as a symbol of South Asian resilience in the face of state-sanctioned racism.
Source: India Currents ↗Duncan McDuffie's Mason-McDuffie Company was the dominant real estate developer in Northern California, having built Berkeley's Claremont Court, Uplands, and St. John's Park neighborhoods in the early 1900s. To protect his investment in upper-income white neighborhoods, he added explicit racial exclusion to all deeds: properties would revert if occupied by anyone of "African or Mongolian descent."
But racial covenants only controlled land he had sold. To extend segregation more broadly, McDuffie lobbied the Berkeley City Council to create a new legal tool. In March 1916, the Council passed Ordinance No. 452, designating the Elmwood neighborhood as Class 1 — the nation's first officially single-family residential zone. Denser housing forms, and the lower-income and minority families that inhabited them, were explicitly excluded.
Berkeley's invention would spread: by the mid-20th century, single-family zoning covered the vast majority of residential land in American cities, encoding racial and economic segregation into municipal law for generations. It remains the structural backdrop for Berkeley's housing crisis today.
Born in 1937 in Velvadam, a village of roughly 8,000 in what is now Andhra Pradesh, India, Lakireddy Bali Reddy arrived at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960 to study engineering. He was part of the small but growing cohort of skilled Indian students who came to American universities before the major immigration wave of the 1970s.
The Berkeley he entered was still a city shaped by exclusionary zoning — a city where the very housing market he would later dominate had been structured to keep non-white residents out. Reddy, however, was not interested in housing as a place to live. He was interested in it as a mechanism of wealth.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 — the Hart-Celler Act — abolished the national-origins quota system that had effectively barred most Asian immigration since 1924. The new preference system, which favored family reunification and skilled workers, opened a door that had been closed for generations.
For Indian immigrants, the effect was immediate. Engineers, doctors, and scientists who had been educated in post-independence India's new IITs found a path to American universities and corporations. UC Berkeley — already home to a small Indian student community since the early 1900s — became a major destination. The Bay Area's emerging technology and research sectors were hungry for exactly the kind of talent India's universities were producing.
Source: UC Berkeley Library — Immigration Timeline ↗In 1967, Ashok Desai stepped off an airplane for the first time in his life, arriving from rural India. Within four days of landing in the United States, he had applied to live at International House on the UC Berkeley campus — a residential community founded on the principle of cross-cultural understanding.
Ashok Desai (IH 1968–69) became a community leader whose influence radiated back to his hometown in India. "Many people from my dad's hometown and our community were inspired to go to college, to come to Berkeley, and to live at I-House because of his experience," recalled his son Veeral Desai, who himself attended UC Berkeley to follow in his father's footsteps.
The Desai family's story represents the quieter, communal dimension of Indian immigration to Berkeley — the chain of inspiration, the multiplier effect of one person's journey on an entire village's aspirations.
Source: I-House Berkeley, IH Times Fall 2023 ↗In 1975, Lakireddy Bali Reddy opened the Pasand Madras Indian Cuisine restaurant on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. The restaurant became popular and profitable, and Reddy used its earnings to begin acquiring real estate — targeting run-down apartment buildings that other investors overlooked.
He also opened a construction company with his brother, Dr. Hanimireddy Lakireddy (a Yale-trained cardiologist), near the restaurant. A second Pasand location followed in Santa Clara, along with nightclubs in Berkeley and San Francisco. Reddy was building a vertically integrated empire: restaurants to generate cash flow, construction to renovate properties, and apartments to generate rental income.
Source: Wikipedia — Lakireddy Bali Reddy ↗Beginning in 1986, Reddy used his enormous wealth and status in Velvadam to convince impoverished Dalit families that their daughters could have a better life in America. Many families earning less than $1 a day saw an offer from Reddy as an opportunity — not understanding what awaited their children.
Over the following 13 years, Reddy brought at least 25 women and girls — and possibly as many as 99 people total — to Berkeley using fraudulent visas, fake identities, and sham family relationships (including a brother and sister posing as husband and wife, and the same posing as parents of the girls he trafficked). On arrival, the women and girls were put to work in his restaurant and rental properties, paid little or nothing, housed in his apartments, and subjected to sexual abuse.
The abuse began before they arrived. Federal prosecutors found evidence that Reddy had been sexually abusing girls in Velvadam itself, and that the trafficking to America continued a pattern that had started years earlier. In one documented case, he brought a 13-year-old girl to the US in 1993 specifically for sexual relations.
In 1991, UC Berkeley graduate students founded Asha for Education, a volunteer-driven organization focused on improving educational access and quality in India, with a particular focus on underprivileged children. The Berkeley chapter was the founding chapter of what became a global network.
Asha represents the civic and philanthropic tradition among Indian students at Berkeley — a tradition that stood in stark contrast to Reddy's exploitation of the very villages and caste hierarchies that made Indian children vulnerable. The organization was founded the same year Asha's founders were students at the same university where Reddy was building his real estate empire three miles away.
Source: Berkeley South Asian History Archive ↗Beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, Reddy poured millions into Velvadam and the neighboring township of Mylavaram. He built two elementary schools, a high school, created clean drinking water infrastructure, paid for a new hospital wing, and — in 1998 — opened the state-of-the-art Lakireddy Balireddy College of Engineering.
Bus shelters in the village bore his name. When Western journalists arrived after his arrest in 2000, they found banners reading: "Lakireddy Is Our God. Leave Him Alone." His philanthropy was real — but it was built on the proceeds of trafficking, and it served to increase his power over the very families whose daughters he was exploiting.
The dual identity — generous benefactor in India, predatory trafficker in Berkeley — was not a contradiction in Reddy's mind. It was a coherent strategy: wealth justified power, and power justified access.
Source: SF Public Press ↗In November 1999, Berkeley emergency responders were called to one of Lakireddy Bali Reddy's apartment buildings. They found two young Indian women unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning. One of them — Chanti Pratipatti, 17 — died. Her 15-year-old sister survived.
The two sisters had been brought to the United States only months earlier by two of Reddy's relatives who posed as their parents — who were actually a brother and sister posing as a married couple. This was a standard element of Reddy's trafficking operation.
What is remarkable is who first noticed: not the FBI, not the Berkeley Police, but student journalists at Berkeley High School's newspaper, the Jacket. Investigating the gas leak story for their school paper, they asked questions that police had not: Why were these girls living with this man? Why were their identities inconsistent? Their reporting won the Jacket staff the "Journalist of the Year" award and triggered federal attention.
Lakireddy Bali Reddy was arrested on January 14, 2000, two days before his planned departure to India with one of his trafficking victims. The arrest came after a coordinated investigation by five agencies: the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Labor, and the Berkeley Police Department.
The US Attorney for the Northern District of California indicted Reddy on charges of sex trafficking, visa fraud, and tax code violations. The indictment named Reddy as having carried out "a widespread conspiracy since 1986 to bring at least 25 Indian laborers into the United States through false pretenses."
The case immediately attracted national attention. Reddy — at the time worth an estimated $69 million and earning over $1 million per month from his 1,000+ rental properties — was one of Berkeley's most prominent businesspeople. The revelation that he had been trafficking women and children for over a decade, in plain sight, in one of America's most progressive cities, was devastating.
Source: US Department of Justice ↗On March 7, 2001, Lakireddy Bali Reddy pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit immigration fraud, two counts of transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity, and one count of subscribing to a false tax return. He faced a statutory maximum of 38 years in prison under his original plea deal.
In a move that drew criticism from advocates, his attorneys negotiated the sentence down to 97 months (just over 8 years) at Lompoc federal prison. He was also ordered to pay $2 million in restitution to the surviving sister and her family.
The conviction was Lakireddy Bali Reddy's alone. Two other relatives pleaded guilty to lesser conspiracy counts tied to the immigration scheme — his brother Jayaprakash and sister-in-law Annapurna Lakireddy. His two sons, Vijay Kumar and Prasad Lakireddy, were initially charged more seriously, but federal prosecutors dropped the rape and trafficking charges against both. The U.S. Attorney's office cited concerns about witness credibility after it emerged that a court-appointed interpreter had encouraged prosecution witnesses to embellish their accounts; the lead prosecutor said, "We have concerns about the credibility of the people who would be testifying to these charges." Each son ultimately pleaded guilty only to a single count of conspiracy to employ unauthorized workers — an immigration-labor offense, not a sexual or trafficking crime — and each received a comparatively minor sentence. Neither son was convicted of any sexual, rape, or trafficking offense.
Source: Berkeley Daily Planet, 2004 — case dispositions ↗ Source: ACLU Press Release, 2001 ↗Representing nine trafficking victims, San Francisco attorney Michael Rubin filed a civil complaint in Alameda County Superior Court. Because California had no anti-trafficking statutes at the time, Rubin pursued the case under "slave labor," "false imprisonment," "infliction of emotional distress," and federal RICO statutes, seeking up to $100 million in damages.
The complaint accused Reddy and his associates of exploiting the victims' "youth, their fear, their caste status, their poverty, their unfamiliarity with the American legal system, their inability to speak English, and their immigration status" for "personal pleasure" and "illicit profit."
In June 2004, the case settled for $8.9 million. It was one of the first major civil trafficking settlements in US history, and helped establish legal precedents for future anti-trafficking litigation.
Source: SF Gate, 2004 ↗In 2005, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 22 — the state's first law creating specific criminal penalties for human trafficking. The bill established trafficking for forced labor or services as a felony punishable by 3–5 years for trafficking an adult, and 4–8 years for trafficking a minor.
Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, the bill's chief sponsor, explicitly credited the Lakireddy case: "It was confirmation of what the problem was, and was definitely on our minds." The case had exposed how US law left traffickers largely immune from state prosecution, relying entirely on federal statutes.
California's law became a model for other states and helped define the framework for the broader national anti-trafficking movement of the 2000s and 2010s.
Source: SF Public Press — Trafficking Reform ↗Lakireddy Bali Reddy was released from Lompoc federal prison after serving slightly less than eight years of his 97-month sentence. He registered as a California sex offender upon release, as required by state law.
Despite his criminal conviction, Reddy's rental holdings did not disappear. By 2013, he still owned Everest Properties, which advertised more than 100 Berkeley-area units on its website. The properties he had assembled over decades remained a significant presence in Berkeley's rental market — and for the families of Reddy's victims, his name lingered on the city's leases long after his release.
Source: Wikipedia — Lakireddy Bali Reddy ↗In 2020, the Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to rename a two-block stretch of Shattuck Avenue as Kala Bagai Way, honoring one of the first South Asian women to immigrate to the United States, who had been locked out of her Berkeley home by racist neighbors in 1915.
The renaming is rich with irony: the same street where Lakireddy Bali Reddy built his restaurant empire — the engine of his trafficking operation — now bears the name of an Indian woman who was herself a victim of American racism. The city that invented exclusionary zoning honors a woman who survived it.
Source: India Currents ↗On November 8, 2021, Lakireddy Bali Reddy was found unresponsive at his home and transported to Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, where he was pronounced dead of natural causes at age 84. His engineering college in India posted a tribute: "We miss you Sir … India's favorite son."
In the same year, the Berkeley City Council adopted a resolution to end exclusionary single-family zoning in Berkeley by December 2022 — seeking to repeal the very ordinance that Duncan McDuffie had engineered 105 years earlier. The resolution was part of a broader California movement to legalize more housing density and address racial segregation baked into land-use law.
The convergence of these two events in 2021 — the death of the city's most notorious Indian-origin figure and the formal repudiation of the racist zoning system that structured its housing market — marks a moment of potential reckoning with the city's divided inheritance.
Source: KTVU ↗ Source: Berkeley City Council 2021 Resolution ↗The city's geography made it possible: affordable industrial housing stock near a world-class university, a long history of caste and race hierarchies encoded in zoning, and an international student pipeline that funneled new arrivals directly into its neighborhoods.
The Reddy case directly catalyzed California Assembly Bill 22 (2005) — the state's first human trafficking law. It established the template for dozens of state statutes that followed, and helped shape the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act's implementation.
The rental holdings Reddy built — operating as Everest Properties — continued in Berkeley after his imprisonment. The properties he assembled over four decades remain a substantial presence in the city's housing market.
In 2021, Berkeley resolved to end the exclusionary single-family zoning it invented in 1916. The same structural tool that enabled Berkeley's racial segregation is now being dismantled — 105 years later.
The Berkeley High School Jacket remains one of the most celebrated examples of student investigative journalism in US history — credited with breaking a case that FBI and police had not caught. The "Journalist of the Year" award it received helped elevate journalism as a civic practice.
The 2020 street renaming on Shattuck Avenue reclaims a piece of Berkeley's public geography for South Asian memory that doesn't involve exploitation. It names the city's Indian history with a survivor, not a predator.
Ashok Desai's 1967 arrival at I-House inspired multiple generations from his Indian hometown to pursue university education and immigrate to the US — an example of the quiet, compounding impact of one immigrant's journey, distinct from the headline-driven narratives of the same era.