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KUALA LUMPUR – Aravindan Balakrishnan, the jailed leader of a self-styled Maoist cult in London, has died at a prison in Dartmoor, the United Kingdom, at the age of 81.
Known as Comrade Bala, he attained infamy after he was found to have kept several women in abusive and captive-like conditions for decades at a house in the Brixton area of London. Most of them had started as his followers in the early 1970s.
Among them was Malaysian Siti Aishah Wahab, then 69, who was freed from his clutches in October 2013 by the police after she had stayed under him for more than three decades.
Aishah had gotten to know him after she arrived in London for her studies in 1968 and attended a talk he gave at Malaysia Hall.
The BBC reported the UK Prison Service as confirming that Aravindan died in jail yesterday.
According to the Daily Mail, Aravindan, born in Kerala state in India and raised in Singapore before moving to London in 1963, had called himself a “revolutionary socialist”.
He used his fervent speeches to recruit fellow students, including Malaysian nurses, for his cause.
As Siti Aishah, who was from Jelebu in Negri Sembilan, got involved in activities organised by him, she lost touch with her relatives back home.
After her rescue in 2013, she was visited by her elder sister Kamar Mahtum Abdul Wahab from Malaysia in a widely publicised trip that saw the siblings being reunited after three decades.
In December 2015, the New Straits Times reported that Siti Aishah was adjusting well to life since gaining her freedom and was working as a social volunteer.
Aravindan was found guilty of sexual assault and abusing women members of the group by the Southwark Crown London Court in January 2016, .
He was given a 23-year jail sentence for rape, sexual assault, child cruelty and false imprisonment.
According to the BBC, the court had then heard that Aravindan had established the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the 1970s in south London and convinced his followers into thinking he could read their minds.
He had brainwashed them into believing that a supernatural entity named Jackie would cause trouble like natural disasters if they disobeyed him.
The news agency also quoted his daughter Katy Morgan-Davies as saying that her ordeal in confinement under him had been “horrible, so dehumanising and degrading”.
Not allowed out of the house since she was a child, she only found out he was her father when she became an adult, and also learned that her mother was one of his followers who stayed with them. – The Vibes, April 9, 2022