It’s not just the liquor lobby which ensured DSP Anupama Shenoy’s exit from the force.
It’s not just the liquor lobby which ensured DSP Anupama Shenoy’s exit from the force. She seems to have rubbed a sect of the powerful Lingayat community the wrong way, with sources claiming that Rs 40 lakh had changed hands to get her transferred in January this year and ensure she was not around to create problems for them.
Ms Shenoy’s painful ordeal did not start with the recent dispute over the construction of a liquor shop owned by a local Congress leader Veerendra Kumar. A mining baron from Sandur, who heads a sect of the Lingayat community, was reportedly upset with her for taking the side of people opposing the construction of his iron ore pellet manufacturing plant at Yashwant Nagar village in Sandur. On June 3, a day before resigning, Ms Shenoy had visited Yashwant Nagar and took local police officers to task for registering an FIR against “innocent people” for allegedly demolishing the compound wall of the pellet factory.
Interestingly, on the same day, she had facilitated the trip of the pontiff of a particular Lingayat sect from Kottur town to Jagalur in Davangere district via Ujjini village despite opposition from a rival sect, who reportedly argued that in the 1970s, a court had banned the movement of the community’s seer in Ujjini. “The DSP arresting Mr Ravikumar and allowing a rival seer to pass through Ujjini sparked anger in the particular sectr,” said a source.
