The leader of a Maoist cult faces years in prison after a London court found him guilty of sex assaults and rapes, and imprisoning his daughter for 30 years.
Josephine Herivel, an Irish woman who lived at Aravindan Balakrishnan’s commune in Brixton and helped his daughter to escape two years ago, condemned the verdict as political persecution.
“You are sending an innocent man to prison. Shame on you,” the Belfast-born woman shouted from the public gallery of the court.
Balakrishnan (75) was convicted at Southwark crown court of six counts of indecent assault, four counts of rape, cruelty to a child under the age of 16, two counts of actual bodily harm and false imprisonment.
Balakrishnan, who came to Britain from Singapore in 1963, used physical violence, sexual degradation and intimidation to control the women who constituted the membership of his cult.
One cult member, Sian Davies, who died after a fall from a window in 1996, bore Balakrishnan’s daughter, who is now 32.
The cult leader kept his daughter isolated from the outside world, did not send her to school, and forbade her to have any contact with other children or anyone outside the cult.
Detailed diaries her father told her to keep formed part of the case against Balakrishnan, detailing his cruelty towards her and others.
The young woman said, after yesterday’s verdict, that she had been kept like a “caged bird” and that, if she had not escaped in 2013, she would have died of undiagnosed diabetes or taken her own life.
‘Caged bird’
“I would be dead. I was so ill I was fainting. And if I hadn’t [died] from diabetes I would have committed suicide because I just couldn’t bear feeling like that any more. I just had had enough. I didn’t want to live like an animal any more. I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings. Like a fly in a spider’s web. Just really helpless and powerless,” she told the BBC.
Balakrishnan set up his collective, called the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, in the 1970s at a bookshop in Brixton. Most of his followers drifted away, leaving only a group of women who fell under the sway of the man they called Comrade Bala.
The cult’s philosophy soon became focused on Balakrishnan himself and the powers of what he told his followers was a warfare machine called Jackie – an acronym of Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and the Hindi god Immortal Easwaran.
When she was seven, his daughter wrote in her diary: “Comrade Bala beat Comrade x for keep laughing when he is here.” Five years later, she wrote: “Comrade Bala disciplined Comrade x for jumping next to his room. He gave her 13 beats. He said 37 more beats to come.”
His daughter was freed when Herivel alerted a charity to the fact that she was there and they helped her to leave. Herivel remained loyal to Balakrishnan however, and after the verdict yesterday, she said: “I am angry about what happened.”
Judge Deborah Taylor told Balakrishnan he faced a “substantial custodial sentence” but the cult leader’s daughter said that she was ready to forgive him and her late mother for how they had treated her.
“Of course I forgive all of them because to be angry and full of anger and hatred is never the solution. I used to be full of anger and hatred when I was stuck in the cult and used to wish them dead and all sorts of horrible things. But I found that only made me a miserable person. So I believe in what Nelson Mandela said, that if you hold on to that anger, hatred and bitterness then you are still in prison. It is no way to live – to feel anger and hatred,” she said.
