Convicted of rape, Overseas BJP leader in Australia gets 40-yr jail

Balesh Dhankhar, one of the founders of the Australia division of the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP), has been sentenced to 40-year jail term for raping five South Korean women

Melbourne: Balesh Dhankhar, one of the founders of the Australia division of the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP), has been sentenced to 40-year jail term for raping five South Korean women.

Balesh Dhankhar was in April 2023 convicted of drugging and raping five women he met through false employment advertisements.

The Australian court has said that this is a heinous crime; this is a beastly tendency. The court sentenced Balesh Dhankhar to 40 years of imprisonment and ordered no parole for 30 years.

"Egregious Sequence of Planned Predatory Conduct"

District Court Judge Michael King said that he was unable to find any New South Wales case with a similar scale of offending, according to 9news.

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.

Charges against Dhankhar

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, making him one of the worst rapists in Sydney's recent history.

For these crimes committed between January and October 2018, Dhankhar had been attempting to "have his name suppressed" in the last four years.

When police raided Dhankhar's CBD apartment in October 2018, they found dozens of videos of him having sex with women who would either be unconscious, or struggling.

Dhankhar gave the women -- who were alone, desperate for work and new in Sydney -- wine or ice-cream laced with sedatives.

The sexual assaults were recorded using a camera hidden in his bedside alarm clock and on Dhankhar's phone.

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