To all you socialists and garden variety statists, utopia never does pan out, what results instead is poverty, misery, servitude and stack of dead bodies.
The Communist ‘Jesus’: Maoist sect leader accused of keeping slaves for 30 years ‘ran collective like a cult and moved into home of woman captive who later died in window fall’
Witness: Dudley Heslop who escaped the Maoist Cult with his scrapbook of bulletins and teachings from the Maoist collective
- Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his wife Chanda, 67, ran communist sect
- Community worker Dudley Heslop, 59, went to a series of Brixton lectures
- Followers were asked to give up their families, money and property to cause
- ‘He just kind of got them to believe he was like Jesus Christ’, Mr Heslop said
- Comrade Bala, 73, and wife Chanda, 67, ‘kept 3 women captive’ for 30 years
- Aishah Wahab, 69, Josephine Herivel, 57, and Rosie Davies, 30, were ‘slaves’
- Scotland Yard to interview them for the first time today – weeks after rescue
By REBECCA CAMBER, RYAN KISIEL, REBECCA EVANS, NICK FAGGE and MARTIN ROBINSON
PUBLISHED: 18:01 GMT, 26 November 2013 | UPDATED: 20:15 GMT, 27 November 2013
Cult leader: Aravindan Balakrishnan, also known as Comrade Bala, pictured in 1997, convinced his followers he was Jesus Christ, a man who rejected his doctrine said today
A community worker who refused to join the Maoist cult at the centre of an alleged slavery scandal says its extreme left-wing leader managed to convince his followers he was a communist Jesus Christ.
Community worker Dudley Heslop, 59, went to a series of lectures by Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and has revealed today how he treated his followers like army recruits, and took their money and property for his extreme left-wing cause.
The 73-year-old is now accused with his wife Chanda, 67, of holding three women as slaves for three decades.
Mr Heslop said ‘Comrade Bala’ moved into the Battersea house belonging to Sian Davies, the mother of captive Rosie, 30, who died after mysteriously falling from a window in 1997.
Members of his cult were forced to cut off contact with their families and faced severe discipline if they breached any of his strict rules.
Young women were always at the heart of his revolutionary sect.
‘He would say ‘I am the Christ follow me’, Mr Heslop told the Evening Standard.
‘Women abandoned their careers and their futures for him. They would have to put him and the collective before their families.
‘He would take the wages of others for the collective, he was in control. They would run errands and things like that.
‘He wasn’t holding these women by force, he just kind of got them to believe he was like Jesus Christ.’
Mr Heslop said the leader believed that China would invade Britain to ‘free them’ from the ‘Fascists’.
It came as it emerged police are preparing to interview the three alleged ‘Lambeth slaves’, Rosie and two others – a 69-year-old Malaysian, believed to be Aishah Wahab and a 57-year Irish woman, believed to be Josephine Herivel.
Bala came to police attention after setting up a communist squat, the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre, in Brixton in 1976 where the couple ran their group, the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought, holding lectures and film evenings.
