MAHENDRAGARH: Villagers of Narnaul’s Bhungarka village — the place head constable Mahipal hails from — remember the cop, currently in jail for shooting at a judge’s wife and son in Gurugram last week, as a good person. For them, the personal security officer ( PSO ) was a well-behaved man who respected elders. However, his alleged involvement in religious activities apparently disconnected him from his family and relatives, villagers claimed.Earlier, he used to visit the village twice or thrice every few months but lately he stopped going there. Last time, the cop visited his home — the only concrete house in the vicinity with a large iron gate and his nameplate on a wall — around eight months ago. Since then no one in this village has seen him. Only a labourer, hired by Mahipal to take care of the property, has been staying in the house for the past few months. His wife lives in Civil Lines, Gurugram.On October 13 evening, the villagers had gathered outside his house, moments after the news flashed on TV about Mahipal shooting at additional sessions judge Krishan Kant’s wife and son in broad daylight in Gurugram. Kant’s wife Ritu, who was shot in the shoulder and stomach, succumbed to her injuries around 11.30pm on Saturday, while the condition of his son Dhruv, who was shot twice in the head, is still “extremely critical”.The news, villagers claimed, came as a big shock but none of them believed that Mahipal could kill anyone.Babu Lal Sharma, a villager who owns agricultural land adjacent to Mahipal’s farm, said, “He was a soft-spoken and well-behaved person. Whenever he visited the village to take stock of his house and farm, he would speak to me and enquire about the well-being of others.”Mahipal’s uncle Surender Kumar echoed Sharma and said he could not kill anyone. “He is not a kind of person who would get so violent and shoot someone to death,” claimed the uncle, sitting near a pond in front of Mahipal’s house. “And if he has done anything wrong, none of us will support him,” he maintained.Though villagers are not speaking openly about his alleged role in promoting other religion among villagers, they claimed his ‘guru’ was Indraraj Singh, who was detained in 2015 from Sawariya hotel for luring people into conversion to Christianity. But, Mahipal intervened and got him released, and since then no one knows about Indraraj’s whereabouts. Mahipal’s ‘guru ma’ is a woman called Sujata, who is thought to be part of the same group and held another meeting on August 21 at the same hotel. People from Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand and other states had attended the meeting. Acting on a tip-off, the local police had rounded up around 10 people, including CRPF and police personnel who were at the meeting. However, the police released them as they said they had come on their own without any pressure.Sources claimed that soon after Mahipal adopted Christianity, his family and relatives starting distancing themselves from him.

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