The tyranny of ‘Comrade Bala’

Parvathi Menon in The Hindu

ReutersAravindan Balakrishnan, who has been found guilty of offences, including cruelty to a child, false imprisonment and rape and indecent assault.


The details of the story Aravindan Balakrishnan – the 73 year old leader of a bizzare Maoist cult who was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for rape, sexual assaults, cruelty to a child, and false imprisonment – are being unraveled in the British media after two members of his collective broke the silence and secrecy that bound them for the last several decades.

The first is his 30-year old daughter, with the pseudonym “Fran” who was born into captivity ; and the second is Josephine Herival, the woman who helped his daughter escape but still insists that Mr. Balakrishnan is innocent.

In the time between his arrival in the United Kingdom in the 1970s as a young student from Malaysia come to study at the London School of Economics – a handsome young bespectacled man in his photograph – to the wizened old man shuffling to the courts accompanied by his wife, as TV images show him today, Mr. Balakrishnan created an alternate world for a group of people who came under his tyrannical control.

The Brixton-based Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought established by Mr. Balakrishnan, was one of the many splinter groups that emerged in the radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s in Britain. The bright, charismatic and articulate revolutionary attracted followers, including Sian Davies, Fran’s mother. The group set up office in Brixton, and in 1978 it was raided by the police in search of drugs that were not found. Several of them were arrested, including Mr. Balakrishnan. After this a number of people left and a remaining core slowly shut themselves out from the outside world and retreated into a small cult that revolved around a single leader who became increasingly crazed and despotic, Comrade Bala.

For these people, all women, the leader apparently imposed stringent rules about what they could and could not do or say. Comrade Bala frequently invoked the wrath of a universe-controlling machine called Jackie that would wreak hell and damnation on them if they fell out of step. In 1983, Comrade Bala and Ms. Davies had a daughter, but never revealed the fact to her. In unclear circumstances, in 1996 Ms. Davies fell from the bathroom window of a commune house after apparently becoming mentally ill.

Fran was 13 at the time. She had never been sent to school and was taught to read and write at home, becoming as she grew up a keen diarist. Much of what is known about life in the commune is documented in it. She described herself as a “fly caught in a web” and a “bird in a cage with clipped wings” in an interview to the BBC, in which her face was not shown. Her father used to regularly abuse and beat her and the other women, and tell the little girl who longed to go out and play on the swings with other children, that lightning would strike her dead, or she would spontaneously combust.

Fran made an unsuccessful attempt to escape when she was 22. It was in October 2013 that an opportunity presented itself again. Learning of a charity that rescued women, Fran, who believed she was desperately ill with diabetes, and another commune inmate, Josephine Herival, called the charity, which rescued her. The lid on the commune and its activities was lifted.

Clearly, however, Comrade Bala’s hold continues. Speaking to Channel 4 on Friday, Josephine Herival, insisted he was innocent. “I know Aravindan Balakrishnan…he is such a good person. Anyone who knows him will say the same thing.” She says that the evidence given against him in the court are “outrageous allegations.”

Fran is integrated herself into society well, according to her carers, starting formal studies and even becoming a member of the Labour Party – living life that was denied her for 30 years.

What the Maoist slavery sect tells us about the far-left

Far-left 'splittist' sects like Comrade Bala's proliferated in the 70s – and a genuine desire for change was corrupted

• 
• • Tariq Ali
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 26 November 2013 21.00 GMT

Journalists outside Peckford Place in Brixton, one of the properties linked to Aravindan and Chanda Balakrishnan, arrested on suspicion of holding three woman captive at addresses in south London. Photograph: Guy Corbishley/ Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis

The recent Monty Python revival has come with a bizarre reminder from south London that once, long ago, there were a few tiny Maoist groups in Britain who used language that could have been cribbed from Life of Brian.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his 67-year-old wife, Chanda – arrested last week on suspicion of holding three women as slaves in a flat for 30 years – were leaders of a tiny sect of 25 members known as the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, invisible to the left at large. This sect had split from its father organisation, the Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which itself had less than a hundred followers. The Maoists' antics were rivalled by a number of Trotskyist sects, smaller and larger, whose implosion often involved the mistreatment of women, and the story is by no means over.

The Balakrishnans' Brixton commune, it is now alleged, kept three women as virtual prisoners against their will. But it prospered. Membership declined, but property increased. The Balakrishnans pre-empted China's turn to capitalism – according to some reports they had interests in 13 properties, three more than their total membership at the time.

What was the attraction of Maoism? The figure of Mao and the revolution loomed large, but the outpourings from these groups did not suggest a close reading of On Contradiction or other texts by Mao that might have stimulated the brain cells. Instead they became fantasy outfits, each with its own homegrown Mao playing on the genuine desire for change that dominated the 1967-77 decade.

As a political current, Maoism was always weak in Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. This was not the case in other parts of Europe. At its peak, German Maoism had more than 10,000 members, and the combined circulation of its press was 100,000. After the great disillusionment – as the Chinese-US alliance of the mid-70s was termed – many of them privatised, and thousands joined the Greens, Jürgen Trittin becoming a staunch pro-Nato member of Gerhard Schröder's cabinet. In France, the Gauche Prolétarienne organised workers in car factories, and set up Libération, its own paper that morphed into a liberal daily. Ex-Maoist intellectuals occupy significant space in French culture, though they are now neocons: Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Jean-Claude Milner are a few names that come to mind. The leading leftwing philosopher Alain Badiou never hides his Maoist past.

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the 70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture. The daily paper Klassekampen still exists, now as an independent daily with a very fine crop of gifted journalists (mainly women) and a growing circulation. October is a leading fiction publishing house and May was a successful record company. Per Petterson, one of the country's most popular novelists, describes in a recent book how, when Mao died, 100,000 people in a population of five million marched with torches to a surprised Chinese embassy to offer collective condolences. All this is a far cry from the cult sect now being excavated in Brixton.

What always struck me even then as slightly odd was that, regardless of the political complexion of a sect, the behavioural patterns of its leaders were not so different. Even those most critical of Stalinist style and methods tended to reproduce the model of a one-party state within their own ranks, with dissent limited to certain periods and an embryonic bureaucracy in charge of a tiny organisation. It was in western Europe, not under Latin American or Asian military dictatorships, that clandestinity and iron discipline were felt to be necessary.

Young women and men who joined the far-left groups did so for the best of reasons. They wanted to change the world. Many fought against the stifling atmosphere in many groups. Women organised caucuses to monitor male chauvinism inside the groups and challenged patriarchal practices. Pity that not all the lessons were learned. Easy now to forget that many who fought within and led the women's and gay liberation movements – in Europe and elsewhere – had received their political education inside the ranks of the combined far left, warts and all.

I can still recall a South American feminist calmly informing a large gathering of revolutionaries in the 70s that advances were being made against machismo. "Only last year," she declared, "my husband, who is sitting on the platform, locked me in the house on 8 March so I couldn't join the International Women's Day demonstration." The husband hid his face in shame.

Now the 70s really does seem another country. The thunder of money has drowned much that was and is of value. The campaign to demonise trade unions – indeed, any form of non-mainstream political activism or dissent – continues apace, despite the fact that the left has never been weaker. A sign, perhaps, that the votaries of the free market remain fearful of any challenges from below.