by engaging the Haryana police in a breathless chase across three states, there hasn’t been a peep out of his ‘real’ family members. Barring, of course, the brief trip his ageing mother Naseeb made to visit Gurmeet Singh in Rohtak’s Sunaria jail on September 25.
A lot of what Honeypreet claimed in her nine-minute chat-on-the-run with india today TV appears problematic. Contrary to her teary assertion that she never nursed any Bollywood dreams and wanted to remain behind the scenes, Honeypreet fully shared Gurmeet Singh’s penchant for the bling lifestyle of ostentatious, over-the-top clothing, flashy cars and glitzy movies. Starting out in 2015, she has been in all his five movies, even co-directing the last two—Hind ke Napak ko Jawab and Jattu Engineer. Just a few months before his incarceration, Gurmeet Singh had famously bragged that ‘Honeypreet has broken Jackie Chan’s record by playing 21 different roles’ in his now-unlikely-to-be-released sixth movie, Online Gurukul.
Also quite the social media animal, on www.honeypreetinsan.me, her personal web portal, Honeypreet describes herself as a “philanthropist, cine editor, actor and director”. She has, believe it or not, over one million followers on Twitter and another 528,000 on Facebook. This hardly sounds like the reticent bystander she now, understandably, wants to be seen as.
The only ‘family member’ by his side when Gurmeet Singh was convicted of raping two sadhvis on August 25, Honeypreet was subsequently also permitted to accompany him onboard the chartered helicopter that ferried him to Rohtak’s Sunaria jail. She even requested permission to stay with the prisoner in his jail cell as his “physiotherapist”, but was, expectedly, turned down.
It has been one hell of a chase since then. There’s evidence to show that Honeypreet headed back to reach the Dera Sacha Sauda in Sirsa around 3.45 am on August 26. Separating from the rest, she left Sirsa heading out to Hanumangarh, where she stayed with relatives for a night before travelling to Gurusar Modiya on August 28.
While the SIT, headed by Haryana police ADGP P.K. Agarwal, tracked her diligently and came close to nabbing Honeypreet on more than one occasion, she somehow always managed to evade the posse. And for someone who’s now posing as a ‘damsel in depression’, Honeypreet seems to be well versed in the ways of a seasoned absconder.
Consider what the SIT now knows: Accompanied by just one or two persons at any given point and time, Honeypreet ditched the greater luxury of the top-of-the-line Lexus SUVs she was accustomed to in Gurmeet Singh’s company, for the relative anonymity of smaller Hyundai and Maruti hatchbacks; smartphones were replaced by cheap Rs 800-1,000 feature phones with the pre-activated, pre-paid SIM cards freely available in Rajasthan (where Sacha Sauda has a significant following).
But like all fugitives, Honeypreet (or someone accompanying her), made the critical error that every good-cop-in-a-chase looks out for. Mobile phones, she was known to be carrying, were briefly switched on in Punjab on October 1. After that, it was only a matter of time.
Honeypreet Insan will now face a trial and possible conviction. On September 18, DGP B.S. Sandhu said a total of 41 people were killed (35 in Panchkula and 6 in Sirsa) in the August 25 violence, besides destruction of property worth crores.
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