When Ashik Uddin Lasker stopped a convoy of two cars trying to enter the Bangalore Club and asked for the identification of the member since the car did not have the mandatory club sticker, he was merely carrying out his duty as a security guard at the most elite club in the city. Neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen the events that this led to.
For, in one of the cars was R P Sharma, an Indian Police Service officer. Journalist Raghu Karnad, who was an eyewitness to the incident, described in a Facebook post what transpired: "...constables dragged the guard behind a parked vehicle and started knocking him around. The poor guy was in terror."
Karnad and other members intervened to get Lasker released, upon which Sharma proceeded inside and wrote a complaint against the guard, according to witnesses. Crucially, while Sharma's written complaint to the club, which Business Standard has seen, merely demanded that the club president take action against the guard because he did not allow the vehicles to enter despite being told that he was a member, a complaint under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was later filed against Lasker. The complaint was filed by Sharma's driver, Paapanna, according a source at the Cubbon Road police station, where the First Information Reports were filed. FIRs were also filed under Section 341 (wrongful restraint) and Section 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) of IPC. The assistant commissioner of police in charge of the case refused to comment saying the investigation was under way and Sharma, when contacted, emphasised that he was not the complainant in the case.
As a member of the British-era club said, on condition of anonymity, "The guard is as powerless in this equation as you can imagine." After Karnad's post went viral, a lot of media attention and a petition to the commissioner of police against Sharma's actions signed by several well-known figures in Bengaluru, the club, too, held an inquiry and Sharma was suspended for a month.
Soon after, the excise department raided the club and found it to be in violation of liquor licensing norms and promptly cancelled its permission to serve liquor. It is also being investigated for evasion of excise duty running into lakhs. Sharma denies any coincidence, pointing out that the club was fined Rs 25,000 last year, too, for violations.
But the 146-year-old Bangalore Club may not be the only one to lose its alcohol licence. Last week, the urban district deputy commissioner is reported to have ordered deputy commissioners in the excise department to conduct an inquiry into excise licences of clubs and submit reports in a week.
At the club, Lasker is no longer to be found. The guards who are currently posted there say they are all new and do not know him. Club Secretary Colonel (retd) HPM Soans declines, very politely, to comment on anything, saying the matter is sub judice. At the security firm that employs him, executives say they have deliberately asked Lasker, who is from Assam and in his early 20s, to keep a low profile and refuse to divulge his details.
Prem Menon, who heads the firm, says "Lasker is with us and we are cooperating with the police. We don't want him to feel demoralised or face any kind of mental stress." But the security guard may yet have to pay a heavy price for doing what eyewitnesses say was merely his duty.
