Lambeth slavery case

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 Singaporean man, Aravindan Balakrishnan, and a 67-year-old Tanzanian woman, his wife, Chanda Pattni, had been investigated for slavery and domestic servitude. Three women – a 69-year-old Malaysian woman (later revealed to be Siti Aishah Abdul Wahab), a 57-year-old Irish woman (Josephine Herivel) and a 30-year-old British woman (Rosie Davies) had been rescued from the same residence on 25 October 2013.

Balakrishnan was born in Kerala in India but migrated to Singapore, where his father was a soldier, when he was 10. As a student at Raffles Institution and later the University of Singapore, he became increasingly politically active and believed that as a "revolutionary socialist" he would have been imprisoned had he admitted he was a Communist. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1963 at the age of 23 on a British Council scholarship to study at the London School of Economics and married his wife Chandra in 1971. Comrade Bala believed the British state was fascist after witnessing the country's mistreatment towards the people of Singapore during the Malayan Emergency between 1954 and 1960. Over the years he built up a following by giving lectures on his radical beliefs and staging various sit ins and protests. He was a regular attendee at London demonstrations, where he waved Mao Zedong banners and addressed the crowds. Conferences would begin with a clenched fist salute to the Chinese revolutionary leader. In 1974, Balakrishnan was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain for breaching party discipline. In return, he published a leaflet through his Workers’ Institute labeling his old party “fascists”. 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. This new headquarters was located above a bookstore that sold Chinese reading materials.