A medical doctor by training, Naicker rose to political prominence in his hometown of Durban as a member of the NIC's left wing.
Because of his activism, Naicker was jailed eight times, charged in the Treason Trial, and subjected to banning orders that lasted, cumulatively, 14 years.
[2] In March 1928, he left Durban for the first time to travel to the United Kingdom, where he passed university entrance examinations at Skerry's College in 1929.
[5][4] Aged 29, he made his maiden political speech in February 1940 at Durban City Hall;[5] in his autobiography I. C. Meer recalled that Naicker "took his stand clearly and forcefully".
[6] In April 1944, Naicker became the founding chairperson of the Anti-Segregation Council, which was established by members of the NIC's Nationalist Bloc to pursue mass mobilisation against Indian segregation.
The campaign was coordinated at a national level by the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), with a joint Passive Resistance Council (PRC) composed of representatives from both the NIC and its Transvaal counterpart the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC); Naicker and the TIC's Yusuf Dadoo (his classmate in Edinburgh) alternated in the presidency of the PRC.
[5] In January 1948, when he and Dadoo staged a protest at the Natal–Transvaal border in defiance of the Immigrants Regulations Act, 1913, he was arrested again at Volksrust and sentenced to a further six months' imprisonment.
We must form a united democratic front and challenge any force that will lead the land of our birth to the fate of fascist Germany or Japan.
As part of the campaign, on 31 August 1952, Naicker addressed a rally in Red Square and led the crowd in occupying a whites-only waiting room at the Berea train station (an orchestrated act of civil disobedience); he and the others were jailed.
Unlike several of his political allies, Dadoo among them, he did not join the Communist Party of South Africa, nor did he support the turn to armed struggle and the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
[5] Although he retired from frontline politics, he returned to a prominent position in the NIC in the mid-1970s, having been asked to support the new organisation's campaign of resistance to the South African Indian Council (SAIC).
[2][11] Speakers at his funeral included Alan Paton, who described him as "jollity personified",[8] as well as Nokukhanya Luthuli, I. C. Meer, Doctor Goonam, and Norman Middleton.