Founder of ‘Overseas Friends of BJP’ in Australia sentenced to 40 years for predatory rapes
text_fields
Balesh Dhankhar, a prominent figure in the Indian-Australian community and a founder of the Australian wing of the ‘Overseas Friends of BJP’, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for the premeditated and highly predatory sexual assaults of five Korean women.
Dhankhar was convicted in April 2023 after a Sydney jury found him guilty on all 39 charges, which included 13 counts of rape, 6 counts of administering an intoxicating substance to facilitate rape, 17 counts of recording intimate videos without consent, and 3 counts of indecent assault.
The crimes were committed between January and October 2018, with Dhankhar luring victims through false job advertisements for Korean-to-English translation work.
According to court findings, Dhankhar met his victims at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel bar, located near his apartment. After gaining their trust, he drugged and assaulted them in the same hotel, secretly recording the attacks. During a police raid on his home, investigators discovered date rape drugs along with overwhelming evidence of filmed assaults.
During sentencing, District Court Judge Michael King described Dhankhar’s actions as "premeditated, elaborately executed, manipulative, and highly predatory." He noted that the case was one of the most severe of its kind in New South Wales.
"This was an egregious sequence of planned predatory conduct against five unrelated young and vulnerable women over a significant period," the judge said.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, Dhankhar denied drugging the women and insisted that the encounters were consensual. He claimed that there was a "difference in how I interpret consent, to how the law sees consent."
Dhankhar was once a highly regarded figure within the Indian-Australian community. He was closely associated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP, and reportedly played a key role in organising Modi’s Sydney reception in 2014. He was also linked to the Hindu Council of Australia.
Following his arrest in 2018, the ‘Overseas Friends of BJP’ distanced itself from him, stating that he had resigned from the organisation that same year.