The leader of a secretive Maoist commune on trial for falsely imprisoning his daughter for three decades has denied any responsibility for her not knowing how to cross a road or use money in a shop when she finally left in 2013.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, is accused of not allowing his daughter to leave a series of communes across south London. He claimed at Southwark crown court that her diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder after she left aged 30 having spent her whole life in the Maoist sect was because she was “a fantasist capable of creating trauma”.
The Kerala-born communist, who ran the Workers’ Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton from 1976, repeatedly called his daughter a liar in the witness box as he spoke in public for the first time since three women, including his daughter, left his secretive communist sect and went to the police.
He denies 16 charges including rape, sexual assault and assault of two women, and wrongful imprisonment and child cruelty in respect of his daughter.
Under cross-examination from Rosina Cottage QC, for the crown, Balakrishnan admitted he had decided that no agencies in the outside world should know about his daughter because “there were a lot of problems that come with that”. He believed Britain was “a fascist state” and that over-reliance on the NHS was dangerous because it stood for “Never Help Self”.
He said he and his daughter’s mother, an acolyte called Sian Davies, decided the girl should grow up believing that her father and mother were a Peruvian freedom fighter and an “English rose” who had both died.
The collective was “the opposite of a nuclear family” and the girl was home-schooled, partly because Davies had been bullied at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. His daughter, who cannot be named, was precocious and by the age of four she knew all her times tables up to 12, he said.
Balakrishnan, an aged figure with long grey hair, listened to the barristers’ questions with the help of an electronic hearing loop. He said he had told his daughter that she could leave if she wanted to and said she did go out with others, once a week, to the shop or launderette.
He denied the rape and sexual assault of two other women and claimed to the jury that he was “the focus of competition” by “jealous” women who made sexual advances to him. He said he had sex with one of the women he is accused of raping, and said she was “absolutely not” unwilling. “There was no force involved, there was no deception involved,” he said.
Balakrishnan told the court that his political beliefs included faith in the existence of an invisible “electronic satellite warfare machine” called Jackie, which he said was built by the Communist party of China and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
He told the court he could control it through thought and linked the device to the recent Labour leadership contest. He also said it was responsible for the death of a Malaysian leader and for the Challenger air shuttle disaster.
He said “Jackie” stands for “Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran”. He said: “It controls everything. In different ways, I could control it.”
Balakrishnan said that one day he declared “hell to Razak”, the name of a leader of Malaysia. The next day Razak died. He said that when he attacked one of the collective members for “challenging me”, “that same day, Challenger [Nasa’s space shuttle] blew up”.
Earlier, he told the court that his political activities were motivated by British colonial “cruelty” in Singapore, where he was brought up.
Balakrishnan came to Britain in 1963 to study at the London School of Economics, and he told the jury he believed that “the whole of Britain, the British parliament were basically misleading people” with what he described as “sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie”. He said the British state was “passing off fascism as democracy”.
He described how he had come from a state of emergency in Singapore after the second world war, where “the cruelty was unbelievable, especially to people who had helped [Britain] against the Japanese. The cruelty, killing, torturing, arresting, and whole families were deported back to China. That is not something anyone can like.”
He said that in 1976 when he set up the Brixton Workers’ Institute at 140 Acre Lane, “Britain was attacking and destroying so many people, not just in Malaya but in so many parts of the world. There were British colonies which were being treated in an extremely bad way, and in Africa, under the name of democracy.”
