Indian-Origin Cult Maoist Leader Who Raped Followers & Held Daughter Captive Dies In Jail
Aravindan Balakrishnan preyed on his female followers, convincing them that he has god-like abilities.
New Delhi: A Maoist cult leader who held women captive in his south London home for 30 years died in prison at the age of 81, Mirror News reported.
Aravindan Balakrishnan preyed on his female followers, convincing them that he has god-like abilities.
The Enfield cult leader, known as Comrade Bala, was sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2016 after his cult, which he had been running since the 1970s, was revealed.
Balakrishnan was convicted of a variety of crimes, including child maltreatment, false detention, and assault, according to the BBC. He died in HMP Dartmoor yesterday.
Jurors heard that he raped two of his followers during his trial at Southwark Crown Court.
He also terrorised his detainees by claiming that a made-up robot named Jackie could read their minds.
His daughter described her trauma as harrowing. After she surrendered her right to anonymity, she described it as "awful, so dehumanising and disgusting."
"I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings," she continued.
Morgan-Daivs described her father as a "psychopath and a narcissist," adding: "People like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein were his heroes, and you couldn't criticise them in the house either.
She had been assaulted and barred from singing nursery rhymes, going to school, or making friends during her ordeal.
Her father, she claimed, was utilising the cult as a "pilot unit" for his great plans to conquer the globe.
Balakrishnan founded the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, his cult, in the early 1970s with the goal of destroying the "fascist regime," and mandated that his adherents refer to him as Comrade Bala.
The group's major idea was that only he and Mao Zedong, the Chinese ruler, had the right to "create a universal dictatorship of the proletariat."
The jury heard horrific aspects of his cult, such as how his followers were commanded to exult in the killings of anti-communists, as his ideas grew more radical over time.
Balakrishnan is said to have wished that three million people had perished in the Tiananmen Square massacre instead of the 3,000 who died.
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