LONDON: Aravindan Balakrishnan, a 75-year-old Indian-origin man who ran a secretive extremist Maoist cult here, was on Friday sentenced to 23 years in jail by a U.K. court for a string of sexual assaults.

Balakrishnan, known to his followers as Comrade Bala, was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court in London for six counts of indecent assault, four counts of rape and two counts of actual bodily harm. He was convicted following a jury trial in December last year where it emerged that he had kept his daughter in captivity for over 30 years.

The daughter, who was named for the first time today as 33-year-old Katy Morgan-Davies, described her situation as “horrible, dehumanising and degrading.” Morgan-Davies told the BBC: “I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings. The people he looked up to were people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein — you couldn’t criticise them either in the house. They were his gods and his heroes. These were the sort of people he wanted to emulate.” She had told the court she was beaten and banned from singing nursery rhymes, going to school or making friends. Balakrishnan’s wife, Chanda, had claimed earlier this week that his conviction was a “frame-up.”–PTI