The phone buzzed when the voice note landed. Actor Ranveer Singh's manager stared at the phone. The number was unknown. But it was registered in the US. Out of curiosity, he clicked it open.
The voice on the recording was unhurried. It named a figure: Rs 20 crore as ransom. Otherwise, the actor will meet a fate that his “next seven generations will remember.” The caller left behind a name: Harry Boxer, Bishnoi gang.
Everyone in Mumbai knew what it meant: bullets, blood and Bishnoi – Lawrence Bishnoi.
Just a few weeks ago, shots had been fired outside producer-director Rohit Shetty's home in Mumbai. One of the suspects was the shooter behind the killing of politician Baba Siddiqui. Fear had travelled faster than words.
Bollywood had seen this before. In the 1990s, Dawood Ibrahim's men called producers from Dubai. This felt the same. The same empire of fear except for one detail that made it somehow worse. Lawrence, the 32-year-old man allegedly behind all of it, was sitting in a high security jail.
THE FAMINE AND THE KING
The story of Lawrence Bishnoi begins not with a gun, but with thirst, and a Maharaja.
The year was 1899. The sky over the Thar was a cruel, bright azure and the land a cracked brown stretch of sand. The Chhappania Akal, the famine of Samvat year 1956, had turned the desert into a graveyard.
Maharaja Ganga Singh, ruler of the princely state of Bikaner, stood upon the battlements of his fort, watching the horizon where the cruel earth met the unsparing sky. Cattle lay where they fell. Villages were abandoned. The dead were too many to count.
“If the clouds will not give us water,” he is said to have vowed, “I will steal it from the rivers of the north.”
By 1922, work on the Gang Canal had begun. The canal originated at the Hussainiwala Headworks on the Sutlej River, near the city of Ferozepur in Punjab. The location was deliberate: the Sutlej ran perennial, fed by Himalayan snow.
Water was diverted through massive sluice gates into a main channel that headed southwest, across the state border, into the heart of the desert. When the gates at Hussainiwala finally opened in 1927, the water moved through 129 kilometres of engineered earth. Behind it, the land turned green.
Behind the water came people. From the lush fields of the Manjha and the heartlands of the Malwa, the early settlers began their trek. They came with their bullock carts, their iron plows, and their ancient traditions.
From the heart of the Thar came the Bishnois of Rajasthan, men and women who treated the trees like kin and the deer like gods, ready to turn this new, wet earth into a sanctuary.
Maharaja Ganga Singh granted subsidised land, sometimes he gave it away as a reward. Within a decade dozens of new villages emerged on what is now the Punjab-Rajasthan border. One of them was Dutaravali (Dotarianwali), in Fazilka district.
THE COVENANT OF JAMBHOJI
Before we follow the settlers into the new frontier, we must understand who the Bishnois are. Because without that understanding, none of what follows makes sense. Not the blackbuck. Not Salman Khan. Not Lawrence Bishnoi.
In 1485, in the village of Pipasar, fifty kilometres north of Nagaur in western Rajasthan, a young man named Jambheshwar founded a sect. Jambhoji, as his followers would call him, laid down 29 principles, the Niyamas, for a new community. The name he gave them was Bishnoi, from bish (twenty) and noi (nine). Some believe the sect derived its name from Lord Vishnu, whom Jambhoji worshipped.
Some of the commandments were simple. Do not cut green trees. Be compassionate toward all living beings. Do not kill animals. Do not consume alcohol or tobacco.
Perhaps the most striking of his teachings concerned the blackbuck (antelope). According to folklore, he declared the blackbuck as sacred.
These principles would survive 500 years, migrate across state borders, and eventually produce a confrontation with one of Bollywood's biggest stars.
THE ‘MILKY’ BOY
The Bishnois who settled around the Gang Canal carried their theology with them. Into this community, on 12 February 1993, a boy was born to a police constable named Lavinder Singh and his wife Sunita. The boy was fair-skinned. His mother named him Balkaran. She also gave him a second name, inspired, it is said, by the British administrator Henry Lawrence. His friends would call him Milky. The world would come to know him as Lawrence.
In 2010, Bishnoi enrolled at DAV College in Chandigarh. By 2011, he had attached himself to the Student Organisation of Panjab University and dreamt of becoming its president. His teachers recall him as quarrelsome.
It was in the corridors of the university that he met Satinderjit Singh, better known as Goldy Brar. Together they became synonymous with violence on campus.
Nobody knows exactly how the saga entered the chapter of campus criminality. Some claim a fiancee was burnt alive during a college election, setting him on a road of personal vengeance. The allegation has never been confirmed, and Bishnoi has not spoken of it publicly. What is certain is the aftermath: within a year, the FIRs began. Attempted murder. Trespassing. Assault. Robbery. Seven cases in Chandigarh between 2010 and 2012 alone.
THE MAKING OF A DON
By 2014, an armed standoff with the Rajasthan Police ended with his arrest. He was twenty-one years old and already the subject of multiple criminal cases across two states. For Bishnoi, prison was the finishing school.
Inside, he studied the mechanics of the criminal world with patience. He understood that the small-time extortion rackets and campus intimidation that had brought him here were petty acts. He saw how the men who lasted built structures: construction syndicates, real estate networks, cross-border smuggling chains that could function whether the boss was free or in a cell. He watched how reputation worked in the underworld, how a single high-profile act of violence against the right target could do the work of a hundred ordinary crimes.
He began to build. Slowly, methodically, and from inside a jail.
THE BLACKBUCK AND THE STAR
On 1 October 1998, Salman Khan, on location in Jodhpur for Hum Saath-Saath Hain, allegedly drove into the desert at night and killed two blackbuck. The Bishnoi community lodged a complaint. The case wound through the courts for twenty years.
Lawrence found his rallying cry in his ancestral identity by adopting the blackbuck as his personal banner. While being transported to Jodhpur Court, Bishnoi issued a public death threat against Khan. In 2018, his associate Sampath Nehra was arrested outside Galaxy Apartments in Bandra, allegedly conducting a reconnaissance of the actor's home.
THE WIDER STAGE
By the time Sidhu Moose Wala was shot dead on a Mansa road on 29 May 2022, Bishnoi had become a name that transcended the crime beat.
Sidhu was driving his Mahindra Thar through his native village of Moosa in Mansa district when two vehicles intercepted him. Twenty-eight bullets were fired at him in less than a minute. The killing, carried out with precision that suggested military-level coordination, put his network on front pages across India. Goldy Brar, calling from Canada, claimed responsibility and named Bishnoi as his partner.
THE CANADIAN CONNECTION
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was a prominent Sikh separatist leader who had been designated a terrorist by the Indian government. When he was shot dead outside a gurudwara in Surrey, British Columbia in June 2023, Canada pointed the finger at the Indian state.
But in the months that followed, a more tangled picture emerged. Canadian investigators alleged that the Bishnoi gang had been used as a proxy network, and its alleged sponsors were in Indian intelligence.
New Delhi denied everything. Bishnoi himself, issuing statements from his Sabarmati cell, declared himself a patriot and a Hindu nationalist. He despised the Khalistan movement, he said. He was nobody's instrument.
Whether or not those denials are true, a gangster from a border village in Fazilka had become a geopolitical operator.
TERROR IN MUMBAI
In 2024, his gang claimed responsibility for the murder of NCP politician Baba Siddique outside a Mumbai building. Siddiqui was known, above all, for his closeness to Salman Khan.
Siddique had stepped out of his son's office in Bandra on the night of 12 October 2024. Three bullets hit him before he reached the pavement. He was the kind of man who knew everyone: three-term MLA, networker, connector, the host of the Iftar party where Bollywood royalty came every year to be photographed embracing each other. He had no known enemies. He had one known friend who had very powerful enemies.
By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, someone had already posted online claiming the kill. Reason given: proximity to Salman Khan.
The Siddique killing was significant for reasons beyond the victim. It demonstrated that the gang's operational reach had extended to Mumbai, traditionally the territory of other networks, and that it was willing to strike targets with maximum symbolic visibility. The message was not just to Salman Khan. It was to every potential target, and every potential rival, that geography was no longer a constraint.
THE ‘NATIONALIST’ SPIN
In April 2025, after the Pahalgam terror attack, the gang issued a public threat to Pakistan and Hafiz Saeed, declaring “Lawrence Bishnoi Gang will become death for Hafiz Saeed,” trying to position itself as a nationalist, anti-Pakistan brand.
The pivot is characteristic of his gang’s PR strategy. It has used the media cleverly to first portray its vendetta against Salman Khan as the community’s grievance, and then markets itself as “Made in India” and “Protector of the Faith/Nation.”
THE EMPIRE BEHIND BARS
By blending religious and nationalistic posturing with a corporate-style hitman network, Bishnoi hasn’t just filled the vacuum left by Dawood and Shakeel; he has upgraded the underworld into a 24/7, social-media-driven syndicate.
From inside jails, he has constructed what the NIA now describes in its charge sheets as a structured criminal organisation. He gives his gang corporate logic: hierarchy, territory, discipline, media strategy, international territories.
Today, Lawrence is inside Gujarat's Sabarmati Central Jail, lodged under maximum security since 2022. But his empire continues its reign of threat and violence.
He has endless access to smuggled phones and encrypted apps. He uses VoIP calls that can't be easily tapped. His shooters and enforcers in Canada, Thailand, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Canada and the USA wait for his call to unleash his plans. His network is linked to more than 800 sharpshooters.
FRIENDS TURN FOES
In November 2025, Lawrence's younger brother Anmol Bishnoi was deported from the US to India. He is now in Tihar Jail. The NIA is using Anmol's deportation to map the gang's remaining international contacts.
Apart from a severe operational blow, his arrest has also triggered a war between Bishnoi and Brar, who worked together for nearly 15 years.
The partnership began to fracture in 2024 after Anmol Bishnoi's arrest in the US. The Bishnoi camp believed Brar had not provided sufficient legal support. By early 2025 both factions had formally split, with several prominent gangsters shifting sides and triggering an active gang war.
The rupture turned lethal in December 2025. Inderpreet Singh alias Parry, a close associate from DAV College days, a man whose mother used to send Lawrence food during court hearings, was shot dead in Chandigarh's Sector 26. The Bishnoi gang claimed responsibility, saying Parry had defected.
Brar released a six-minute audio message in response, saying Bishnoi “has signed his own death warrant,” and warning him that “nature will decide your fate.”
So the man in the Sabarmati cell now faces threats from multiple directions simultaneously: the NIA, the Canadian investigators, the FBI, and his oldest friend turned enemy issuing death warnings from North America. The empire is still standing, and still expanding. But the cracks in its foundation are now visible.
As of early 2026, Lawrence has never been convicted of murder. The NIA's charge sheets are voluminous, the case count stands at 84 across multiple states. The Indian prosecution system moves slowly, and Bishnoi's lawyers have proved adept at using that slowness. He remains, in the eyes of the law, an undertrial. In the eyes of his gang, a commander. In the eyes of his community, something more complicated still.
THE IDOLISED OUTLAW
In Dutaravali, the village that rose from the desert after the Gang Canal brought water to a thirsty land, people tell the story of Lawrence Bishnoi with a mix of awe, fear and myth.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Bishnoi’s rise is the romanticisation of his persona. Through fan pages, reels, and YouTube documentaries, he is often portrayed as a rebel or a “protector of faith.”
This glamorisation has even entered the e-commerce space; his trademark attire is now sold as ‘Lawrence Bishnoi Jackets.’
THE MAN, THE MYTH
The legends that swirl around the man in the Sabarmati sound like ghost stories. They say he is an ascetic. They whisper that he has never tasted meat or touched a drop of alcohol in a decade, living on a single meal of dry rotis and water. In the myths, his cell is not a prison but a monastery. They describe him sitting in a cross-legged trance for eighteen hours a day, meditating on the 29 tenets of his faith, emerging from the silence only to issue a single, devastating command that echoes across oceans. They say every act of violence is preceded by a period of fasting.
There is a darker legend: that he is the “Sword of the State.” The myth portrays him as a “deep state” within the state. When a terrorist falls in a back alley of Lahore or a separatist is silenced in a Canadian suburb, the whisperers say it was Lawrence, and his fans cheer on TV debates.
The answer, most likely, is simpler and uglier than any of them. Between the myths and the kill lists, there is an irony that is genuinely disturbing. Lawrence Bishnoi is also the president of the youth wing of Jeev Raksha Samiti, an organisation founded by Late Sant Ram Bishnoi to protect living beings.
The canal still flows. The blackbuck still grazes on the border plains. And the Bishnois of the border struggle to reconcile a faith that rose from non-violence with a name that has become synonymous with death.
- Ends