Balesh Dhankhar, a community leader of Indian origin in Australia, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison in Sydney for the “elaborately executed, manipulative and highly predatory” rapes of five Korean women, reported 9News.

Dhankhar is the founder of the Australian wing of the Overseas Friends of BJP, an official support group of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He was convicted of 39 offences, including 13 counts of rape, six of administering an intoxicating substance, 17 of recording intimate videos without consent and three of indecent assault.

A Sydney jury found him guilty on all charges in April 2023.

Dhankar lured the women with fake job advertisements for Korean-to-English translation work. He met them at a bar in Sydney’s Hilton Hotel before drugging and raping them, either at the hotel or his nearby apartment. Police later found extensive video evidence of his crimes, as well as date-rape drugs and a hidden recording device at his home.

Dhankhar, who arrived in Australia as a student in 2006, was a prominent figure in the Indian-Australian community and acted as a spokesperson for the Hindu Council of Australia. He had also worked with organisations including the ABC, British American Tobacco, Toyota and Sydney Trains.

His connections to the Bharatiya Janata Party drew scrutiny after his conviction. The Overseas Friends of BJP had reportedly played a role in organising Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reception in Sydney in 2014. The group said that Dhankhar had resigned in 2018, the year in which he was arrested.

Sentencing Dhankhar on Friday, District Court Judge Michael King said he could find no comparable case in the state of New South Wales. “This was an egregious sequence of planned predatory conduct against five unrelated young and vulnerable women over a significant period,” King observed.

The court noted that Dhankhar had meticulously documented his crimes, maintaining a spreadsheet with victims’ personal details and assessments of their vulnerability.

Karen Iles, advocate for the victims, welcomed Dhankar’s sentence. “They are horrific crimes of the most serious nature and in order to change attitudes, to change the behaviour, we need to have deterrence,” she told Australian Associated Press.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Dhankhar denied drugging the women or that the encounters were non-consensual. “There is a difference in how I interpret consent, to how the law sees consent,” he told a report writer.

During the trial, jury members had to watch recordings of the sexual assault, and on one hearing, they reportedly had to be sent home early as they were traumatised after watching the videos

Dhankar’s non-parole period expires in April 2053. He will be 83 years old when his full sentence ends.