The Maoist cult leader, Aravindan Balakrishnan (75), who ran the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought from 1976 to 2013, has been sentenced to 23 years in jailed for raping two devotees, as well as imprisoning his daughter.
After all the allegations against him, his wife, Chanda Balakrishnan (67), remains loyal towards him, and is convinced that he has been framed. She was shocked when she got to know about his infidelity and his secret daughter. She said, “We lived in small privately rented accommodation, so we were always on top of each other. I couldn't see how it happened.”
His wife remains loyal to him and accepts that he made a mistake. She also allegedly believes that the women involved had suggestively coerced him into having sex. She stated, “He is loving me all the time. It was a mistake that happens. For 99.99 per cent of the time he is loving me and not these other people.”
Balakrishnan had father the daughter, which he had imprisoned, with Sian Davies, a former pupil at Cheltenham Ladies' College; she was one of his most devoted followers.
For the first time, his 33-year-old daughter, Katy Morgan-Davies, has come out in the open to the media, and stated that her father was “narcissist and a psychopath” whose actions were “horrible, so dehumanising and degrading”.
She spent the first 30 years of her life in captivation until she managed to escape at the age of 30. Describing her father, she said, “The people he looked up to were people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. You couldn't criticise them either in the house. They were his gods and his heroes.”
It was revealed in court that Balakrishnan had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having a narcissistic personality disorder and had caused psychological harm to his daughter. Judge Deborah Taylor told him, “You were ruthless in your exploitation of them.”
Morgan-Davies spoke about the period when she was kept captive, and how she had befriended mice and rats. “I used to sit there and look at them and hope that I could pet them. They would come and look and I used to think they were smiling at me almost, telling me everything would be all right.”
The commune member, Josephine Herivel was the one who helped his daughter escape. However, she deeply regrets doing so as she believes Balakrishnan is innocent. While leaving the court, she shouted, “This is a political persecution. AB [Aravindan Balakrishnan] has been framed. He is a good man.” It has also been said that Herivel has been diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome.
Although she was kept in isolation for several years, Morgan-Davies said that she has forgiven her father, and would like to reconcile with him in the future. She mentioned, “Nelson Mandela said, 'If you leave the prison with hatred and anger and bitterness, then you are still in prison.'”
