A disgraced Indian community leader has been jailed for 40 years, with a non-parole period of 30 years, for drugging and raping five young South Korean women in Sydney.
Married IT consultant Balesh Dhankhar, 45, was sentenced by Justice Michael King in the NSW District Court on Friday after a jury found him guilty of 39 charges, including 13 of sexual assault, in April 2023.
Dhankhar, who rubbed shoulders with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after founding a satellite group of his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and was a spokesman for the Hindu Council of Australia, lured his victims to his CBD apartment with fake job ads before drugging and raping them and filming the attacks.
In handing down his sentence Justice King said he could not find a worse case in the state, and called the rapes “elaborately executed, manipulative and highly predatory”, Nine News reported.
“This was an egregious sequence of planned predatory conduct against five unrelated young and vulnerable women over a significant period,” he said.
Justice King also remarked that Dhankhar, who came to Australia as a student in 2006, presented himself as community-minded and altruistic but that was “entirely inconsistent with his seriously flawed and predatory character”, and found that he targeted women who “didn’t ask too many questions”.
Dhankhar claimed the sex was consensual and denied drugging the women, and Justice King found the only remorse he has shown was for lying about the fake job advertisement, and otherwise showed “no contrition for his actions”, Newswire reported.
But Dhankhar also lied to doctors about being unable to sleep in order to obtain the date-rape drugs he used on his victims, and kept a spreadsheet where he rated the women on looks, vulnerability and intelligence.
When police raided his apartment in 2018 they found the medication and a video recorder hidden in a clock radio.
In their victim impact statements the women spoke of suicidal ideation, anxiety and loss of trust, with one saying the attack had “inflicted deep wounds upon her soul”.
Dhankhar will be eligible for parole in April 2053.
Header image: Left, Balesh Dhankhar. Right, with Narenda Modi (Facebook).
