Aravindan Balakrishnan

A Maoist cult leader sexually abused his brainwashed female followers and imprisoned his own daughter in homes across south London for more than 30 years, British prosecutors said on Thursday.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, used fear, sexual degradation and physical and mental violence to keep the women under his control, turning his commune based on Communist teachings into his own personal cult, London’s Southwark Crown Court was told.

Even his own daughter, who was born to one of the women in the collective, was bullied and beaten, barely allowed to leave the house, never permitted to go to school, play with friends or see a doctor, said prosecutor Rosina Cottage.

She was not told who her mother and father were, and when she finally escaped his clutches two years ago, she was aged 30 and very ill with diabetes.

Balakrishnan, a small, grey-haired bespectacled figure, denies 16 charges of cruelty to a child, false imprisonment, indecent assault, rape and assault.

“This case concerns the brutal and calculated manipulation by one man to subjugate women under his control,” Cottage said.

“Each woman lived a life of violence, fear, isolation and confinement. They were forced into sexual acts over which they had no choice and were deliberately degrading and humiliating. He seemed to exult in his power over them.”

Balakrishnan was the head of a Communist group in the 1970s called the Worker’s League in south London, a charismatic and energetic speaker who attracted students and followers with his plan for world revolution and to overthrow what he saw as Britain’s fascist state.

Cottage said he made himself its Party Secretary and the collective’s members were only allowed to recognize the authority of Balakrishnan, or Bala as he was known, and Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China.

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 that he was all powerful and all-seeing, the prosecutor said.

“From being a collective agitating for the rights of the proletariat the group had become the cult of Aravindan Balakrishnan,” Cottage told the jury.

The women were allowed no friends or social life and the house was locked all the time which Balakrishnan said was to keep out fascist agents, the court heard.

They stayed because they were too frightened to leave, reporting each other to Balakrishnan if they were critical or not following orders.

“If you questioned him or said anything he considered anti-party he would become furiously angry and hit the offending individual,” Cottage said.

In the 1980s the women began to be sexually abused when his wife was sent away. One of the alleged victims, who “escaped” in 1989, was forced to write pornography, then later made to give him oral sex and raped, Cottage said.

Another, who came to Britain from Malaysia to work as a nurse, said she was punched in the stomach when she resisted his advances before too being sexually abused and later raped.

The court was told when Balakrishnan’s daughter was born in 1983 to one of the women, he told the collective the baby was a result of electronic warfare.

As a child, she was told her parents were dead, and only learned who her mother was after her death some 14 years later while a DNA test after she left the group proved Balakrishnan was her father. Her family did not even know she existed.

The trial continues.

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