Aravindan Balakrishnan: the Maoist cult leader who used brutal violence and rape to strip women of their dignity
Aravindan Balakrishnan employed a series of tactics to subjugate his victims to decades of physical and mental abuse
File photo: Aravindan Balakrishnan, a former Maoist Cult leader, arriving at Southwark Crown Court, London Photo: Rex
04 Dec 2015
The brutal violence, repeated rapes, sexual assaults and the astonishing mind control games Aravindan Balakrishnan used to brainwash his followers into believing that he was a god stunned even the most seasoned police officers assigned to investigate his case.
The diminutive, bespectacled pensioner carefully created an atmosphere at his south London commune in which the women who looked up to him were gradually stripped away of their family ties, their independent thought, their freedom and their dignity.
The sustained level of physical and mental torture that was inflicted upon them was so gradually and cleverly extended that his victims themselves found it difficult to leave, and one or two have stood by him to this day.
File photo: A general view of the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre, which closed in the late 1970s in Brixton, London Photo: National Pictures
Balakrishnan was born in Kerala in west India but moved to Malaya, where his father was a soldier, when he was 10.
As a student at the University of Singapore, he became increasingly politically active and believed that as a "revolutionary socialist" he would have been imprisoned had he admitted he was a Communist.
He emigrated to the UK “by ship" in 1963 at the age of 23 on a British Council scholarship to study at the London School of Economics and married his wife Chandra in 1971.
Comrade Bala believed the British state was fascist after witnessing the country's "cruelty" towards the people of Singapore during the 'Time of Emergency' between 1954 and 1960.
File photo: Aravindan Balakrishnan arrives at Southwark Crown Court, London Photo: PA
Over the years he built up a following by giving lectures on his radical beliefs and staging various sit ins and protests.
He was a regular attendee London demonstrations, where he waved Chairman Mao banners and addressed the crowds.
Conferences would begin with a clenched fist salute to the Chinese revolutionary leader.
File photo: Aravindan Balakrishnan, 74, with some of the collective, including the victims Photo: Nicholas Razzell
Community worker Dudley Heslop, 59, who attended his lectures said: "Bala always came across as approachable and friendly. He would always stop you in the street and chat.
“He was handsome and slim and dressed neatly. He always wore a pressed shirt."
David Vipond, a communist at the time who also met him at meetings, said: "Balakrishnan was charismatic and dominant. There was money, they [the leadership] ate well. Balakrishnan did not see himself as being one of the 'plebs’. He saw himself as a big shot.”
In 1974, Balakrishnan was expelled from the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) for breaching party discipline for “splittist activities” – in other words, Balakrishnan wanted to go his own way. In return, he published a leaflet through his Workers’ Institute labelling his old party “fascists”.
Eventually, after the more liberal members of his group drifted away, a cult of around 10 female members formed around him.
The collective moved to Brixton in 1976, under the title Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
File photo: The Mao Zedong Memorial Centre in Brixton, London Photo: National Pictures
Members were handed a rota of chores and only allowed to go out in pairs because of safety fears.
He told them he was "nature and nature was him" so that everything was controlled by him from the sun, the moon, wind and fires. He claimed he could overthrow governments and control natural disasters.
The women believed he had the power of life and death over them all.
In order to progress his cause, Balakrishnan invented "Jackie" – a type of dangerous, mystical creature that monitored all thought and could control minds. It was used to threaten the women with torture and death.
Balakrishnan believed he had to scrub his followers clean of the bourgeois culture and lifestyle.
Slowly, their freedom was eroded.
Their family members were branded fascist agents and ostracised. Those who worked had to donate all of their wages to the commune.
They included a trade unionist, a nurse, and a welsh former student of Cheltenham Ladies College; Sian Davies, whom would later bear him a daughter. He told other members of the collective that her birth was as result of electronic warfare.
File photo: Sian Davies aged 21 after graduating from Aberystwyth University Photo: National Pictures
Balakrishnan became increasingly paranoid and appeared to revel in his power over the group. It was a dangerous and heady mix. His control over them became tighter and tighter.
In 1977, the Singaporean authorities claimed that Balakrishnan and others, many of them former Singaporean students he had associated with in London, were plotting to overthrow Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s leader.
Balakrishnan was stripped of his citizenship, which means it will now be impossible to deport him there. It is not known if he has a passport for any other country.
He began sexually abusing two of the women in 1979, making references to animal sexual activity and forcing himself on them, often beating them and making the others watch as he did so.
All of the women were beaten and four of them, not including his wife, were said to have either been sexually assaulted or engaged in sexual relations with him.
Some of the victims were summoned to his room and forced to wait outside, as if by appointment, before he called them in and forced sexually assaulted or raped them.
The women were ordered to swallow when he ejaculated as it was the “the elixir of life”.
Such was his delusion that, to this day, he claims the women seduced him and had been competing for his affections.
Between 1986 and 1992, three of the women plucked up the courage to make their escape. Miss Davies died in 1997 after falling from a bathroom window at the commune in mysterious circumstances.
Another died in 2001 after falling and hitting her head on a kitchen cabinet.
Three others, including the daughter he had kept imprisoned since birth for 30 years, only made their escape when one of them used a secret phone to contact a charity in October 2013, and the police were called. His wife, has stood by him, often attending court.
Balakrishnan, who often shook his head in amazement as he listened to the evidence against him unfold during his four-week trial, clearly still believes his own hype.
A paper by Aravindan Balakrishnan Photo: National Pictures
As the only defence witness, he stood in the dock and told jurors that a challenge to his leadership resulted in the 1986 space shuttle disaster and that his invisible accomplice “Jackie" was responsible for the death of a Malaysian prime minister and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
Even his own defence barrister appeared exasperated as he said Jackie was an "electronic satellite warfare machine" built by the Communist Party of China and the People's Liberation Army.
"It has got unbelievable control," he said. "It can pull your head out from your body.”
Balakrishnan was remanded in custody to be sentenced on January 29.
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