ARAVINDAN Balakrishnan a.k.a Comrade Bala (left) – the Maoist cult leader convicted of raping and enslaving his female followers including Malaysian Siti Aishah Wahab for almost four decades – has died in his Devon prison cell in Southwest UK on Friday (April 8) aged 81.
The Kerala-born Aravindan who was found guilty of “brutal” violence and was sentenced for six counts of indecent assault, four counts of rape and two counts of actual bodily harm in January 2016 died in custody at the HMP Dartmoor prison six years into his 23 year prison sentence, according to the UK Prison Service.
Siti Aishah from Jelebu, Negri Sembilan (she should be 77 at the time of writing) was one of three women held captive by Aravindan and his partner Chanda Pattni, a Tanzanian national of Indian descent at their Brixton home that served as the cult’s headquarters.
They were ultimately freed after Scotland Yard raided their home in November 2013 after the Palm Cove Society (a charity) got in touch with the authorities after receiving a call from a woman who said she had been held prisoner for three decades.
Siti Aishah was 24 years old when she went to Britain in 1967 to study quantity surveying with a Commonwealth scholarship found herself entangled with the group led by Aravindan, and eventually cut herself off from her family.
Aravindan who lived and grew up in Singapore and Malaysia had moved to the UK in 1963 to study at the London School of Economics on a British Council scholarship from Singapore.
It is there that he met Chanda whom he married in 1969 at about the time he set up the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the 1970s in south London. He had told his followers that disobeying him would unleash supernatural forces and convinced them he could read their minds.
In an hour-long documentary entitled The Cult Next Door by BBC2 in January 2017, Siti Aishah revealed how Aravindan – who also had penchant for Malaysian nurses – had made wild claims while subjecting his followers to obey bizarre rules.
For instance, they were not allowed to go to the hospital or dentist to seek treatment. Instead, he told his followers that they should let their teeth “drop naturally” and that by the time they were a 100 years old, their teeth would have regrown.
When one of the commune members Sian Davies became pregnant with Katy Morgan-Davies, Aravindan told them that the reason her belly was growing larger was due to gas.
When the baby was born, he did not reveal who the father was, and while they looked after Katy collectively, they were discouraged from cuddling or caressing her.
When asked about punishment meted out by Aravindan, Siti Aishah said she was beaten and slapped if she did something wrong. She recalled an occasion when she was punished after trying to comfort Katy, then 4, when she accidentally wet herself.
It was then that she considered leaving but could not do so as she had no money or friends outside the commune. She was also scared of being deported. – April 10, 2022
Pic credit: The Independent
