Katy Morgan-Davies loves sparkly tops, feathers and butterflies. She is a striking woman but her exuberant look is not just about fashion – it’s a form of defiance. Now 33, she spent 30 years in a cult where members were forced to share a pile of charity shop clothes, in dark, drab colours.
There’s something dehumanizing about not having your own clothes, but dehumanizing is a word that applies to most of Katy’s childhood. In fact, that was the point: to raise her without any of the normal human “encumbrances” of emotional ties, or love.
Born into the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought — a strange, secretive “collective” that sprang up in south London in the Seventies — Katy was a human experiment, a model citizen being prepared by her cult-leader father for the moment he took over the world.
While a popular TV comedy of the time, Citizen Smith (starring Robert Lindsay), made a group of inner-city revolutionaries seem amusing, there was nothing funny about the sinister way Comrade Bala — former London School of Economics student Aravindan Balakrishnan — controlled his female followers, including Katy, who didn’t know he was her father until she finally escaped as an adult.
I heard about this group around 10 years ago, when I made Lefties, a film for the BBC about political activists in a squatted street in Brixton in the Seventies. One of my interviewees laughed, recalling the craziness of the time, and said: “We even had Maoists round here.” I had no idea that Katy was still imprisoned in a flat just a street away from where I was filming.
In a busy city, where people know little about their neighbours, the horror of what was going on had passed unnoticed. What had started out as a political movement had turned into a dangerous personality cult based around the worship of Balakrishnan, where women were beaten, abused and controlled. It was only in 2013, when I heard how three women had escaped that I realized just how close I had been to them. Balakrishnan was tried and given a 23-year sentence for rape, indecent assault, child cruelty and false imprisonment last year.
It is hard to overestimate the power Comrade Bala wielded over his followers. He claimed to have a mind-control machine called Jackie (harnessing the power of Jehovah, Allah and other gods) that would kill anyone who disobeyed him. Katy fully believed in Bala and Jackie’s power, yet she became desperate enough at one point to try to run away. She was so unused to talking to strangers that she could not explain her plight and was advised to return “home” by a well-meaning police officer. She then spent another eight years in captivity.
When we finally met last year she was living in Leeds, courtesy of the Palm Cove Society, which provides shelter for women who have been trafficked, enslaved or abused. Explaining that I wanted to work with her to tell her incredible story, she initially gave one-word answers to my questions. Slowly she began to relax and agreed to talk. So I returned with a camera.
What we know of Bala, now 76, is that he was born in India and met his wife, Chandra, at the LSE, where he dropped out of his studies. People who knew him then say he was very knowledgeable and charismatic. He was also a member of a larger Maoist political grouping and broke away to found his own sect, with Chandra, her sister and a group of around 15 devoted followers, including highly intelligent, university-educated, British-born women. These “seekers” were looking for a way to solve the world’s problems, like Josie Herivel, a brilliant young violinist, and Sian Davies, a doctor’s daughter from Wales who was studying for a PhD. Several Singaporean and Malaysian women also got caught in the cult. Some drifted away, but a core group of around seven lived together in a flat in Brixton for many years.
Intelligence proved no bar to the women being drawn into Bala’s world. In the early days, he convinced them the Chinese were about to invade and already had invisible, satellite technology that could monitor their speech and thoughts. Communal, shared life was the way forward. Some women were sent out to work to provide money; others had to care for his wife’s disabled sister and do domestic chores. He told them this was a pattern of communal life all society would eventually adopt. As time went on, he convinced them he would take over the world.
The women believed that if they disobeyed him, floods or other catastrophes would ensue – or even that they would die. They were beaten if they stepped out of line. Some were raped and sexually abused. When Sian began to show signs that she was pregnant, she and Bala’s followers were persuaded — mad as it sounds — that she was just swelling up with “gas.” Katy — or Prem, as she was originally called (Katy, her new name, marks the start of her new life) — was the result.
Bala hijacked her existence to create Project Prem, a child who would be raised by the commune with all members sharing equal responsibility for her care.
During her childhood, Katy was never taken to a doctor or dentist and did not go to school. On rare occasions she was taken out to a shop with one of the cult members, but she never played with other children, or ran or jumped. Group members taught her to read and she is clearly intelligent — but the impact of that lack of love is unimaginable.
Katy told me she was made to keep diaries. Sian would dictate what she had to say. They are chilling documents, recording in detail her daily existence: every bowl of Rice Krispies she ate is written down, as is every beating, which she was forced to explain. It seems Sian was the most strict and cruel of all of them.
Every morning Katy and the others sang songs of praise to Bala, with lyrics such as “Do what you want if you want to die, do what AB says if you want to live”. So there were death threats even in the daily music. They all believed Bala was capable of killing them.
One cult member died of a stroke, which was attributed to Bala’s mind-control machine Jackie. Sian was said to have become another of Jackie’s victims when she threw herself from an upstairs window. What’s very sad is that Katy says she felt only relief when her mother died.
Over the years, one of Bala’s women, a nurse working night shifts to support the collective, managed to break free with help from a colleague. Another ran away but remained under Bala’s spell and returned to visit. But the group really fell apart when Katy became ill with undiagnosed diabetes. Josie, the violinist, panicked and contacted a charity for help. It led eventually to Bala’s arrest.
A DNA test confirmed what Katy had always suspected — that Bala was her father. Today, she is at college and has had no contact with him, but tells me that despite everything she would like to be reconciled. Life, she says, is too short for anger and hate.
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