Memorable World History/Authors

The Workers' Institute: Aravindan Balakrishnan

On 21 November 2013, Metropolitan Police from the Human Trafficking Unit arrested two suspects at a residential address in Lambeth, South London. A 73-year-old ethnic Indian Singaporean man, Aravindan Balakrishnan, and a 67-year-old Tanzanian woman, his wife, Chanda Pattni, had been investigated for slavery and domestic servitude. The case centered on the Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought commune which was led by Balakrishnan. In the early 1980s after a police raid, Balakrishnan decided to move the group's activities underground. Balakrishnan's control over his followers intensified and the commune became a prison to his followers. On 25 October 2013, three women were rescued from the commune. These were: a 69-year-old Malaysian woman (later revealed to be Aishah Wahab), a 57-year-old Irish woman (Josephine Herivel) and a 30-year-old British woman (Katy Morgan-Davies). Katy Morgan-Davies was born into the sect and hadn't experienced the outside world until her release.

Perpetrator

Aravindan Balakrishnan (known to his followers as "Comrade Bala") was born in Kerala, India but migrated to Singapore, Malaya, where his father was a soldier when he was 10. Balakrishnan was a student at Raffles Institution and later the University of Singapore, where although gaining a reputation as a "quiet chap", he became increasingly politically active and believed that he would have been imprisoned in Singapore had he openly admitted to being a communist. In 1977, while living in London, his Singaporean citizenship – which he gained in 1960 – was revoked due to his leadership of the Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, which the Ministry of Home Affairs accused of engaging in "activities which are prejudicial to the security" of Singapore, and denounced him as a radical "closely associated with Eurocommunists". The authorities claimed that Balakrishnan and others, many of them former Singaporean students he had associated with London, were plotting to overthrow Singapore's leader, Lee Kuan Yew.

Despite believing the United Kingdom to be a fascist state due to its treatment of the people of Singapore during the Malayan Emergency, Balakrishnan emigrated to the UK in 1963 on a British Council scholarship to study at the London School of Economics and married his wife Chandra in 1971. Over the years he built up a following by giving lectures and staging various sit-ins and protests. He was a regular attendee at London demonstrations, where he waved banners depicting the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and addressed the crowds.

In 1974, Balakrishnan and his "small clique" were expelled from the Communist Party of England (Marxist–Leninist) on account of "their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities ... spreading social fascist slanders against the Party and the proletarian movement" and attempting "to put themselves above the discipline of the Party". The CPE(M–L) "repudiated the metaphysical logic harmfully promoted" by Balakrishnan in "opposition to dialectical materialism and the concrete analysis of concrete conditions". In response, Balakrishnan set up the Workers' Institute and launched his own publication, the South London Workers' Bulletin, which accused the CPE(M–L) of being "fascists" and "agents of imperialism".

Between 1974 and 1976, his followers attempted to "build revolutionary stable base areas in working-class communities", primarily South London and worked in ordinary jobs. Balakrishnan discouraged his followers from joining trade unions, describing them as agents of the "imperialist fascist bourgeoisie".

Eventually, after the more liberal members of his group drifted away, a cult of around 10 female members formed around him. The collective moved to Brixton in 1976, under the title Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Following Mao's death in 1976, the Institute built the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre at 140 Acre Lane, Brixton, which also functioned as a communist collective of "thirteen comrades", with "13 members living on the premises, half in paid work, six doing full-time revolutionary work, with a strong emphasis on women taking a leading role (apart from leading the Party Committee headed by Bala)". Members were handed a rota of chores and only allowed to go out in pairs, which Balakrishnan claimed was because the area they lived in was "notorious for violence" and "anything could happen".