Kapil Baisala was arrested from Shaheen Bagh after firing two shots.
A day after Delhi Police said a man, who fired two shots in the air at Shaheen Bagh last week, had joined the Aam Aadmi Party last year, the accused’s father maintained that the family has no political affiliations, and insisted that his son was the Prime Minister’s “sewak”.
Kapil Baisala was arrested from Shaheen Bagh after firing two shots. On Tuesday, police released photos of Kapil and his father Gaje Singh joining AAP last year, starting a fresh political row days ahead of voting.
On Wednesday, Gaje Singh claimed the photos showed a mere “welcome” accorded to party leaders Atishi and Sanjay Singh when they visited the area for canvassing during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
“My son works in the dairy with me. Any person can verify that I never shared the stage with an AAP leader. Any association is false. There is no denying my son supported Modi and was a sewak… the road blockade and traffic snarls (at Shaheen Bagh) bothered him. But I don’t know what drove him to this step. I came to know about the incident through the media later,” Singh told reporters.
Locals at Kapil’s Dallupura village, however, said Singh was an AAP member for a brief period, and Kapil had joined alongside him.
The Indian Express tracked people in the photographs released by police. In one of them, Kapil’s relative Fateh Singh is standing with a bouquet next to Yogesh Dedha, an AAP Gujjar leader who unsuccessfully contested municipal polls in the past, as Singh and Kapil wear AAP caps.
“This photo was clicked in Dallupura; all of us had gone there to be a part of canvassing but not in an official capacity. Gaje Singh is a respected person and he was there because of that,” said Fateh Singh.
Dedha added that it was a “one-time thing” during canvassing and that there was no interaction post that.
Sources said Singh approached local AAP leaders in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and expressed his wish to contest from Jangpura, which the party was not willing to give. But since that did not materialise, Singh soon went his own way. Kapil, too, had accompanied his father once or twice during meetings with AAP, a source said.