Leader of Maoist cult (75) guilty of cruelty and sex assaults

A Maoist cult leader has being found guilty in England of sexually assaulting two women and imprisoning his own daughter in a commune for 30 years.

Aravindan Balakrishnan (75), known as Comrade Bala, carried out a “brutal” campaign of violence and “sexual degradation” against the women over several decades.

He brainwashed his followers into thinking he had God-like powers, and invented a supernatural force known as “Jackie” who, he said, could trigger natural disasters if his will was flouted.

After fathering a daughter with one of his acolytes, he kept her a prisoner in their home for three decades.

Beaten, banned from singing nursery rhymes, going to school or making friends, his daughter described herself as a “shadow woman” who was kept like a “caged bird”.

The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons but we are calling Fran, said she would be dead if she hadn’t finally escaped.

“If I hadn’t (died) from diabetes I would have committed suicide because I just couldn’t bear feeling like that any more,” he said. “I just had had enough. I didn’t want to live like an animal any more.”

She fled in 2013 with the help of a charity. She was 30 years old. She had escaped eight years earlier in 2005, but was sent home by police because it was a bank holiday, the trial at London’s Southwark Crown Court heard.

Describing life inside the commune, she said: “I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings. Like a fly in a spider’s web. Just really helpless and powerless.”

Balakrishnan, of Enfield, north London, was found guilty of six counts of indecent assault and four counts of rape. He was also convicted of two counts of ABH, cruelty to a child under 16, and false imprisonment. He was cleared of one count of ABH and one count of indecent assault.

‘Innocent man’

Josephine Herivel, one of his former followers, shouted across the courtroom floor at the accused: “You are sending an innocent man to prison. Shame on you.”

Judge Deborah Taylor said Balakrishnan faces a “substantial custodial sentence”.

The pensioner denied the abuse, and insisted the women vied for his affection and he treated his daughter with compassion. But the court heard he used his charisma and radical politics to prey on women.

The left-winger came to Britain from Singapore in 1963 and enrolled at the London School of Economics - well known during the 1960s for its radical student movement.

By the 1970s he was at the helm of a communist group known as the Workers Institute and based in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London.

He gained a number of followers, but as time went by his influence “waned” and the group dwindled to just six women.

Described in court as a “Jekyll and Hyde character”, Balakrishnan turned his Communist commune into a “cult of Bala” where paranoia and fear became the order of the day.

His followers were only allowed to read left-wing texts, spied on each other, and were sexually assaulted and beaten by Balakrishnan. He convinced them he could control people’s minds and would “scrub them clean of the bourgeois culture and lifestyle”.

One of the women, Sian Davies - who was the mother of his daughter - suffered fatal injuries when she fell from a window at the cult’s home on Christmas Eve in 1996.

The aftermath of the horrifying incident was witnessed by the 13 year-old girl, who was unaware at the time that “Comrade Sian” was her mother.

Balakrishnan was remanded in custody to be sentenced on January 29th.

PA