Gurugram: Ankush Bhardwaj, a national-level shooting coach, has been suspended after being booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for allegedly sexually assaulting a 17-year-old national-level shooter at a Faridabad hotel.
The alleged incident occurred on 16 December, following a competition at Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range in Delhi, when Bhardwaj called the survivor under the pretext of discussing her performance in the match, and digitally penetrated her (penetration with fingers). Faridabad Police Commissioner Satendar Kumar Gupta told ThePrint Thursday that a case has been registered and the police are investigating the matter.
According to the FIR registered against the accused based on the survivor’s complaint, she remained under distress for the next 20 days following the incident, and eventually told her mother on 6 January, after which the mother took her to the Women Police Station in New Industrial Township (NIT), Faridabad.
Meanwhile, the Haryana State Commission for Women has written to Gupta asking him to appoint a dedicated officer for the case and provide information by the afternoon.
ThePrint has accessed a copy of the FIR. The minor, aged 17, is a college student. An only child to her parents, she has been training as a shooter since 2017.
In August 2025, her parents hired Bhardwaj as her coach. He often called her to Mohali, Patiala, Dehradun and Delhi for training. She would go to these destinations and return home by evening.
On the day of the incident, she had a national match at Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range, Tughlakabad, New Delhi. The survivor went there via a taxi and left the event by 11.45 am.
However, as she was preparing to return home, she got a call from the coach who asked her to wait for him as it was ‘important to discuss her performance in the match’.
Around 2 pm, she got a WhatsApp call from Bhardwaj, who told her to go to the lobby of a Surajkund hotel and write down her own analysis of the match, the FIR alleged.
While the complainant insisted on writing the analysis sitting in her car, the coach told her that it would be better to write “sitting away from the shooting range”.
Further, according to the complaint, the survivor went to the hotel lobby and started writing. Bhardwaj met her there and asked her to accompany him to his room so that he could discuss the match with her and complete his own work at the same time. After the discussion, while the survivor sought his leave, the coach allegedly told her to “let him do some back cracking on her” and forcibly made her lie head down on the bed and started pressing her shoulders. After a while, as the complaint claimed, the coach started pressing her head with one hand and slipped the other hand in her pants, inserting his finger in her private parts.
The student gathered courage and pushed the coach aside, she claimed. However, the coach allegedly threatened to ruin her career if she told anyone. He asked her to behave with him normally, and walked her to her car at about 4 pm, from where she returned home.
Even after the incident, the coach kept sending her WhatsApp messages regarding training issues and even complained to her parents that she wasn’t listening to him, the FIR further said.
However, the incident disturbed her too much, and she couldn’t sleep properly. Her mother kept asking her why she was taking stress. On the morning of 6 January, the survivor finally narrated the incident to her mother, who in turn took her to the station to lodge a formal complaint.
(Edited by Vidhi Bhutra)
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