Indian-origin Aravindan Balakrishnan, convicted in a London rape case and secretly running a Maoist sect, died in prison at HMP Dartmoor prison in south-west England on Friday. Aravindan Balakrishnan was sentenced to 23 years in prison by a UK court for sexual assault six years ago. This information was shared by the UK Prison Service on Friday.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 81, was known to his followers as Comrade Bala. Aravindan was sentenced in 2016 to six counts of indecent assault, four counts of rape and two counts of causing bodily harm. Aravindan was convicted in December 2015 after a jury trial in which it was revealed that Aravindan had kept his daughter in captivity for more than 30 years in a barbaric manner.
In this case, Aravindan’s daughter told the court that the time was “extremely dreadful, inhuman and degrading” for her. Sentencing Balakrishnan in this case in January 2016, the judge had said that “you considered him as an object and not as a human being. You committed the heinous crime to save him from the outside world and created a cruel environment for him.”
Born in a village in Kerala, Aravindan Balakrishnan studied at the London School of Economics. Balakrishnan also lived in Singapore and Malaysia before moving to the United Kingdom in 1963. While there, Bala met Chanda, whom he married in 1969. In November 2013, the couple’s flat in Brixton, south London, was raided by Scotland Yard after two followers accused them of rape.
However, refuting the allegations of rape leveled by the women, Aravindan Balakrishnan told the jury that he was caught in a sexual competition between “jealous” women. In this case, after a long investigation, the detectives of Scotland Yard presented all the evidence against Aravindan Balakrishnan in the court, after which he was sentenced.