Maoist cult leader jailed 23 years for raping followers
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 74, leaves Southwark Crown Court in London January 6, 2015. - Reuters
LONDON (Reuters): A Maoist cult leader, convicted of raping and beating his brainwashed female followers and keeping his own daughter a fearful prisoner for more than three decades, was jailed for 23 years on Friday.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, used sexual degradation and physical and mental violence to keep the women under his control.
One of the women was Malaysian Aishah Wahab, 69, who apparently fell under Comrade Bala’s spell and rapidly lost touch with her family.
Aishah had come to London as long ago as 1967 after winning a scholarship to study in London. Prosecutors said Comrade Bala turned his south London Communist commune into his own personal cult with members who believed him to be a god, Reuters reported.
His own daughter, Katy Morgan-Davies, who was born to one of the women in the collective, was also bullied and beaten, barely allowed to leave her home and never permitted to go to school, play with friends or even see a doctor.
"He loved violence, and those totalitarian dictatorships. He wanted to be like that, he wanted to be like Stalin, or Mao or Pol Pot," she told Sky News.
Balakrishnan, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled figure, denied all charges but was convicted at London's Southwark Crown Court in December of offences spanning almost 34 years including child cruelty, false imprisonment, rape and indecent assault.
He began as the charismatic head of a Communist group in south London in the 1970s called the Workers' Institute following the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China.
However, over time, the group's numbers waned, the men were forced to leave and the dwindling group of women were so dominated and brainwashed they believed he was all-powerful.
He threatened them with what he called a supernatural mind-control machine which he named "Jackie" - an acronym of Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran.
Among the group was his daughter. She was not told who her parents were, only learning who her mother was after her death when she was a teenager.
"If I did something wrong, others and me, we would be killed by Jackie," she told Sky News.
"If he intervened by slapping us and beating us... then Jackie would think that enough has been done and not kill us. So we should be thankful that he is hurting us... because we would be saved from Jackie."
Her fate and that of the other followers only came to light when she escaped his clutches in 2013 when she was 30, very ill with diabetes, and suffering with chronic post traumatic stress disorder.
It was reported that in December 2013 that Aishah's sister, Kamar Mahtum, saw her for the first time at a secret meeting arranged by police and charity workers.
Kamar, who had flown to London from Malaysia for the highly charged reunion, had not seen Aishah since 1967. They kept in touch at first but within a few years all letters home had dried up. The revolutionary commune had led Aishah to cut all ties.
Kamar has been able to give the world only the merest glimpse of life behind closed doors, most latterly at 1C Peckford Place in Brixton, the commune’s most recent address.
Kamar told The Telegraph that her sister appeared in good spirits and they spoke in English rather than Malay and Aishah did not discuss the conditions in which she and the other rescued women had been living, nor their alleged captors.
“When I asked her about what had gone on she just clammed up,” said Kamar, “The only thing she wanted me to perceive is that she is happy. She told me: 'I have got friends here, I work here. I do important work here’, but she could not reveal what she did.
"Each time she said something that made me smile she would say: 'Oh, I love your smile. Don’t frown, laugh, smile.”
Kamar said her instinct had been to reach out and help her little sister, but Aishah insisted she had never been lonely in London and had people who looked out for her.
“Aishah said, 'I’ve got enough’, 'my friends feed me’, 'my friends love me, I love them, they help me out’.”
Kamar added: “When she said that I felt that she was trying to tell me … that even without us, she can survive, as she has been for the last 40 years. We’re nothing that important. I felt a lot of disappointment.”
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