A chase by the Punjab Police first pushed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi into Jaipur, where he graduated from campus violence to the liquor trade. An extortion attempt on a leading Rajasthan doctor then landed him in a Jodhpur prison, where he met members of the now Bishnoi clan. A murder case later brought him to a Jodhpur court on January 4, 2018, the same day Bollywood actor Salman Khan was in the court complex for a hearing in the blackbuck poaching case.
That was the day Bishnoi first threatened Khan. The timing was a coincidence but the enmity that keeps Khan under heavy security till today and has also led to deaths, was years in the making – shaped by fate and greed that brought Bishnoi from Punjab to Rajasthan.
When Khan allegedly hunted the blackbuck near Jodhpur between September 26 and October 2, 1998, Bishnoi was just seven years old, living in a village in Punjab’s Fazilka district. Over the last decade, he has repeatedly threatened to kill the actor, as the blackbuck is considered sacred by the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan. In recent years, police have stepped up Khan’s security and arrested Bishnoi’s aides for arranging weapons and conducting a recce outside the actor’s Bandra residence. In 2024, the Bishnoi gang also killed Nationalist Congress Party leader Baba Siddique, allegedly over his closeness to Khan and to establish the gang’s supremacy in Mumbai.
Until 2013-14, the Punjab-based gangster’s network was confined to student politics, campus violence and extortion in the state. The seeds of his expansion into Rajasthan, and of his fixation with Khan, were sown in 2014, when he first entered the state as a fugitive from the Punjab Police.
HT looks at these minute details mentioned in one of Bishnoi’s 35 page confessions to the police in 2020 about his life of crime.
2014: No longer just a campus strongman
Bishnoi was first arrested in 2008 for allegedly assaulting a rival candidate in the Panjab University elections. Until 2010, when he was held on multiple counts of campus violence, and his criminal activities were limited to colleges in the state. He remained active in university politics from 2008 to 2014.
His second murder, in 2014, was also a fallout of university election politics, like the first. With two murders and several violence cases against him, Bishnoi could no longer stay in Punjab and slipped into Rajasthan to escape the heat.
According to his confession, he first fled to Jaipur in early 2014. “There he stayed for three to four months. One of his friends, Ravinder Punia, regularly gave him money for his expenses,” according to his confession. He also said Punia introduced him to a liquor shop owner named Amandeep alias Sonu.
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Amandeep is critical to Bishnoi’s story because he helped him graduate from campus violence to guns and the liquor business, first as a partner and later as an independent investor.
Amandeep also matters to the Bishnoi-Khan story because his murder drew the gangster deeper into Rajasthan, where he met members of the Bishnoi community and first heard about the 1998 blackbuck case.
While on the run from Punjab sometime in May-June 2014, Bishnoi had his first brush with the Rajasthan police when he and his aides fired at the cops who stopped them as they were driving to Balaji. Bishnoi was caught and sent to Sikar jail. He continued to make friends and grow his network in Rajasthan. Bishnoi maintained his hold over campus politics even while working with Amandeep, and was arrested and jailed multiple times.
2015: New alliances and revenge killings
When Bishnoi started making friends and forging alliances inside Punjab’s Ropar prison, he was primarily a Punjab-based gangster, with a few cases in Haryana and one in Rajasthan (the attack on the police team).
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Sometime in 2014, after Amandeep was murdered by the liquor mafia in Rajasthan, Bishnoi expanded his gang into the state and vowed revenge. His confession details at least two revenge murders during this time. Both murders are significant because they take him deeper to Rajasthan, where he meets the Bishnoi community members.
Between 2014 and 2015, Bishnoi and his aides murdered three men – Dhanna and Khan Pehalwan – all of whom were involved in Amandeep’s murder. Police officers who questioned Bishnoi believe these were the months when he forged alliances with more criminals in Rajasthan. By 2017, some of these associates sought his help in threatening a prominent Jodhpur doctor, in the same district where Khan’s blackbuck case was being heard.
2017: Expansion and Jodhpur connection
By 2017, Bishnoi emerged as a known gangster with members in different states. Early that year, he was in Faridkot jail when he was contacted by two men from Jodhpur to attack the house of a prominent city doctor and demand protection money. This case matters most because it eventually brought him to Jodhpur.
“ ….After this at the end of the year 2017, the accused Lawrence Bishnoi on the saying of his two associates Vishnu and Harender who were residents of Jodhpur, made a plan to demand ransom from a doctor(name withheld) who has chain of several hospitals (name withheld) in Rajasthan, and the owner of a travel Company of Jodhpur,” the confession said. It added that Bishnoi’s three aides fired at the doctor and demanded a ransom of ₹1 crore.
The doctor paid the ransom, according to the statement, but Bishnoi was arrested by the Jodhpur police in August 2017 and sent to Jodhpur central jail. Although he earlier spent time in prisons across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan during his nearly decade-long criminal career(2008-2017), this stint would prove particularly significant.
Bishnoi had earlier spent time in prisons across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan during his nearly decade-long criminal career (2008-2017), but this stint would prove particularly significant.According to his confession, it was in this prison that he shared cells mostly with members of the Bishnoi community who were lodged there in smuggling cases.
The confession does not explain how Bishnoi developed an interest in the Salman Khan case. However, police officers who have questioned him in the past suspect that conversations with community members inside the Jodhpur prison may have prompted him to take up what he saw as the cause of the Bishnoi people. His stay in the prison around August 2017 also coincided with the final stages of the proceedings in Khan’s case at the local court.
“Khan did visit Jodhpur court at least twice then. He was also acquitted earlier that year (2017) in one Arms Act case. We can only guess that in prison, everyone must have discussed Khan’s case, which fascinated Bishnoi to take up the cause. That is only a guess. He did not tell me. A second theory is he wanted to be a bigger criminal and make a name in the Mumbai underworld by targeting Bollywood, for which he found a perfect plan: using Salman Khan's name,” a Delhi police officer said on condition of anonymity.
January 4, 2018
In August 2017, Bishnoi was transferred to the high-security Ajmer prison after officials found he was using mobile phones to run his operations. From Ajmer, he allegedly planned the murder of a Jodhpur businessman Vashudev Irani, for which the Rajasthan Police arrested him again. Of all the cases that moved Bishnoi between prisons, the murder of Irani matters the most. The case brought him back to Jodhpur, and months later, put him in the same court complex as Khan.
Back then, the Jodhpur court was regularly hearing Khan's case. Police records showed that sometime in December 2017, Bishnor was taken into custody and transferred to Faridkot prison (it is unclear for which case), only to be brought back to Jodhpur again for a hearing in the Irani murder case on January 4, 2018 – when Khan also visited the court for the closing arguments in the blackbuck case.
Journalists covering Khan’s hearing outside the Chief Judicial Magistrate court in Jodhpur were about to get a bigger story: Bishnoi’s first public, on-camera threat to the actor.
This is what the police have documented of that day, based on Bishnoi’s confession: “Lawrence Bishnoi was arrested in the murder case of Vashudev Irani and brought to Jodhpur where he was produced in court. While coming out of the court Salman Khan had also arrived for a hearing in the same court whom the accused Lawrence Bishnoi threatened to kill because Salman Khan had hunted blackbuck and was not receiving punishment from the court, which greatly hurt the Bishnoi community.”
That afternoon, when Bishnoi told reporters he would kill Khan, he was no longer a seven-year-old boy in a Punjab village or just a university campus gang leader. He was Lawrence Bishnoi, aged 26, the leader of a criminal network across different states with over a dozen murders to his name.