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A popular young actor plays a game of football on a Sunday evening in a ground in Juhu, Mumbai. He finishes the game and jumps into his chauffer-driven luxury sedan to go home. As the car heads out, three men step in and from close quarters fire seven shots, injuring the driver and a bystander. The actor is injured by the breaking glass, but has a miraculous escape. The shooters are apprehended 15 hours later from Kota, Rajasthan. In an audio recording posted on X soon after the shooting, a man identified as Anil Pandit takes credit for the attack.

At the centre of the web is Bishnoi, who has watched his Indian and overseas empire grow even as he himself has shuttled between jails across Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat since 2015. (HT Archive)Pandit is a member of a gang headed by Lawrence Bishnoi, 33, who has been incarcerated in Gujarat’s Sabarmati jail since 2023, and whose name has surfaced, time and again over the past few years, in connection with multiple murders, including those of singer Sidhu Moosewala in May 2022, politician Baba Siddiqui in October 2024, and attacks on the houses of actors Salman Khan and Disha Patani. The gang has also been identified by Indian agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as being behind the June 2023 killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

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Pandit, 32, has become the face of the group in recent years, along with another man he named in his message, Harman Sandhu. Investigators in India believe that this is aimed at keeping the heat off Satwinder Singh alias Goldy Brar in the US; Bishnoi’s deputy Brar is being hunted by the FBI, which has named Bishnoi’s criminal organisation an Organised Crime Group (OCG).

Once a resident of Rair Kalan village in Haryana’s Panipat, Pandit fled India in 2023, say investigators. They believed he travelled to the US via Canada and Thailand. According to the investigators, Pandit works closely with Randeep Malik and the Canada-based Ravinder Singh Dhanda, also part of the Bishnoi syndicate, according to a US federal indictment in July this year. The investigators, who asked not to be named, said Pandit operates from California and is in touch with Brar as well.

Pandit’s name surfaced in several firing and extortion-related incidents this year –– including an incident where shots were fired at a gym owner associated with singer Guru Randhawa in west Delhi, another at a jewellery showroom in Pune, and two attacks in Bhiwadi and Sonipat. The Delhi Police and Haryana Police are investigating these incidents.

The other man named by Pandit, Sandhu, aka Harmanveer Singh, was also put on the wanted list by the FBI in June this year. It is believed that Sandhu is already in FBI custody in California.

But, at the centre of the web is Bishnoi, who has watched his Indian and overseas empire grow even as he himself has shuttled between jails across Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat since 2015. Bishnoi started his gang in the late 2000s and ran it for just a few years before being arrested and jailed, a fact that both adds to the mystique about him, and encourages conspiracy theories.

Investigators now say Bishnoi may have been misleading his interrogators. For since then, his gang and influence have only grown.

It isn’t clear why Bishnoi quit sports and entered the world of crime, but police records show he was sucked into university politics around 2008. Sometime, in 2008, Bishnoi was jailed when he assaulted a candidate of the Panjab University Students Union (PUSU). Bishnoi was a member of the rival Students of Panjab University (SOPU) union. The two groups were arch rivals. The dossier on Bishnoi’s first crime lists a failed murder attempt when he shot at PUSU’s candidate. He spent a couple of months in prison.

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According to the Special Cell’s dossier, it was during those two months that Bishnoi met a man named Ranjeet Dupla, who had lived in the US before and was arrested in Punjab for smuggling arms. “Dupla helped buy weapons for Bishnoi and his friends Sampat Nehra (a jailed gangster arrested for attempting to kill Salman Khan) and Kala Rana (who would go on to become one of NCR’s most wanted gangsters and later deported from Bangkok in 2022). After coming out of jail, Bishnoi then bought his first car, a Mahindra Bolero.”

He took control of SOPU, even contested the 2010 university president elections but failed to win. After the election, he was jailed for the second time after he attacked his rival and broke the man’s leg. His friend Goldy Brar was also arrested in the same case.

Bishnoi and Co. remained active in student politics till 2013. That year, ahead of an election at a government college in Muktsar, Bishnoi, Brar and four others shot a student leader dead. That was their first murder.

Many police officers who have tracked criminal gangs in North India believe Bishnoi’s meteoric rise started post-2013, and that the gang used social media to expand its influence to even recruit members.

“If you look at it closely, Bishnoi has been in jail for more than 10 years now. But, he continues to be in the news because of social media. Look at the number of fan pages he has on Facebook or Instagram. In fact, the Bishnoi gang was the first to confess their hits on Facebook. While Bishnoi was in prison, his aide Goldy Brar used Facebook and later Instagram to issue threats, claim hits and share videos of Lawrence Bishnoi during court visits. These and the attempted attacks on actor Salman Khan made the gang fashionable in North India, especially Punjab,” said one of the investigators.

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One FIR, dated August 26, 2022, against Bishnoi and his gang members by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) specifically talks about their use of social media. Indeed, some of the gangster’s moves seemed made for the medium.

In 2023, when he was in Delhi’s Tihar jail, for instance, Bishnoi claimed to have embraced freedom fighter Bhagat Singh as a hero. At court appearances and photos leaked on social media, Bishnoi wore Bhagat Singh t-shirts.

Then, according to a second investigator, he claimed to have given up rice “for spiritual reasons”. He took to “praying many times a day”, this person added. Bishnoi also claimed he wanted to target actor Salman Khan for allegedly hunting and killing a blackbuck, a species considered holy by the Bishnoi community.

“All this was just a smoke screen for his criminal activities. The gang’s only real job is to make money through extortion or contract killing and expand their criminal network,” said the second investigator. Indeed, Bishnoi has been accused not only of organised crime but also terrorism.

Since 2022, both the NIA and the ministry of home affairs (MHA) have said a conspiracy being hatched by Bishnoi and other members of his gang in India and abroad, to carry out terror acts in the UT of Delhi and other parts of the country.

According to the investigators, the Bishnoi syndicate is a geographically dispersed network in which jailed gangsters, overseas handlers, local shooters, financiers and people accused of providing shelter or logistical support are involved. NIA, in a 2023 charge sheet, outlined how the gang had spread across Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar and Jharkhand and that money generated through criminal activities by it was transferred to countries including Canada, the US, Thailand and Australia.

The agency compared the network’s reach and connections with the underworld model associated with Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company in the 1990s.

The threat posed by the gang is being taken seriously even by the US.

In July, US authorities announced Operation Hard Ball, a coordinated law-enforcement action involving the United States, Canada and Europe in which 37 gangsters from India were charged across three federal indictments while 24 of them were arrested. These individuals are associated with Lawrence Bishnoi, Jaggu Bhagwanpuria and Canada-based Ravinder Singh Dhanda networks.

US prosecutors allege that Bishnoi runs his criminal operations from prison in India (Gujarat) using contraband mobile phones and voice-over-internet-protocol devices. They added that the gang is involved in targeted killings, shootings, extortion, kidnappings, drug trafficking and human smuggling.

Apart from Bishnoi, FBI also named Goldy Brar and Rohit Godara, saying they served as his senior lieutenants, and helped direct members and associates across countries. US authorities said that the gangs use high-profile violence and online claims of responsibility to cultivate fear, particularly in India and among Indian diaspora communities, and then exploit that fear to extort victims.

Handlers outside India, and local shooters, hired for a few tens of thousands of rupees. “The shooters, mostly jobless youth recruited online, know nothing about the whereabouts of the handlers and larger operation. They get their money and weapons and carry out attacks to make a name in the crime world,” said a senior police officer in Delhi, who asked not to be named.

This officer added that “establishing the chain of communication between the suspected handler and the people who execute an attack, identifying how weapons and money moved, and determining whether separate incidents are connected to the same criminal network becomes a challenge. Then the biggest challenge is access. We cannot reach these guys and the US, Europe and Canada don’t respond very often unless the crimes take place on their soil.”