New Delhi: Balesh Dhankhar, one of the founders of the Australia wing of the ‘Overseas Friends of BJP’ organisation, has been sentenced to 40 years imprisonment for the “elaborately executed, manipulative and highly predatory” rapes of five Korean women.
As The Wire had reported before, Dhankhar faced 13 charges of rape, six of administering an intoxicating substance with intent to enable himself to rape, 17 of recording intimate videos without consent, and three of indecent assault. In all, Dhankhar had been charged with 39 offences allegedly committed between January and October 2018. In April 2023, a Sydney jury found him “guilty” of all of the 39 charges.
Dhankhar reportedly met women who had responded to his job ad for non-existent Korean-to-English translation work at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel bar, which is located near his apartment. He would drug the women and rape them at the same hotel, filming the crime. Investigators found overwhelming evidence of filmed recordings at his apartment.
District Court Judge Michael King said, according to 9news, that he was unable to find any New South Wales case with a similar scale of offending.
The offender’s conduct was “premeditated, elaborately executed, manipulative and highly predatory” and demonstrated his desire for sexual gratification came in complete and callous disregard of each victim, he said.
“This was an egregious sequence of planned predatory conduct against five unrelated young and vulnerable women over a significant period,” he said.
Dhankar has denied drugging the women or that sex was non-consensual, saying was a “difference in how I interpret consent, to how the law sees consent”. The police had found date rape drugs in his home during a raid.
Dhankhar’s closeness with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been noted by the Australian media. “Until his arrest in 2018, Dhankhar was highly regarded among the Indian-Australian community, founding a satellite group of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party and acting as a spokesman for the Hindu Council of Australia,” 9news reported.
‘Overseas Friends of BJP’ had reportedly played a key role in organisingModi’s reception in Sydney in 2014. In March, when reports of Dhankhar’s crimes first came to light, the organisation tweeted that Dhankhar had resigned in 2018.
