The border that separates India from Pakistan is lined with 50,000 towering poles that hold 150,000 floodlights, which at night create a glare that is visible from outer space. Passing through the towns on the Indian side of the border, it can be difficult to tell, even in daylight, where one ends and the other begins. Curving along the rolling fields of wheat are nameless dirt roads where men sit on rope benches, whiling away their afternoons, staring as you pass by.

Dutarawali, right by the highway, is slightly different: here, the houses are big, with spacious courtyards. One of the houses – three storeys, painted white with red accents – has a 7ft boundary wall topped with barbed wire and four CCTV cameras overlooking the unpaved street. The symbol of Om is curled on its brown iron door, which has no nameplate. It is the house of Lawrence Bishnoi, who is today, at the age of 33, India’s most notorious gangster.

In October 2024, members of the Bishnoi gang carried out one of the most high-profile murders in recent memory: Baba Siddique, a senior Indian politician, was left in a pool of blood next to his car in a wealthy Mumbai neighbourhood. Shortly afterwards, Bishnoi was linked to a number of killings and attempted assassinations on Canadian soil. By this point, he was already well known. Two years earlier, he had given the orders to shoot and kill Siddhu Moosewala, a Punjabi rapper with an international following, who was gunned down near his village in Punjab. Moosewala was killed, Bishnoi told the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2023, to avenge the killing of a member of the Bishnoi gang.

What is most remarkable about the killings is that Bishnoi orchestrated them while being lodged in a “high-security prison” in the national capital. He has a well-publicised hitlist, with a dozen names on it, including Bollywood stars and standup comics. The Bishnoi gang has about 700 members, according to the NIA, spread across north-western India, the Middle East and North America. He has been incarcerated for more than 10 years, awaiting trial on several counts of murder and extortion, but it hasn’t been a limiting experience. His most serious crimes have taken place while in the custody of the Indian state.

I rang the bell next to the brown door, knocked, and waited. There was no answer. Bishnoi’s immediate family, among the wealthiest in the village, has never spoken to the media. Happy Bishnoi, who is not directly related to Lawrence but grew up in Dutarawali and knew him as a boy, had dropped me off nearby. He had advised me not to knock, not to take pictures, just to look at the home from afar. After getting no response from inside the house, when I found him parked two streets away, he explained that he did not want the CCTV to capture his car on camera.

I had spent the day with Happy in and around the village, talking to villagers and relatives of Lawrence, and so far he had exhibited a joviality that matched his name. But now he wanted to leave, immediately. Ringing the bell was a step too far. Minutes later, out on the highway, I asked Happy if we should pull over for tea. “Once we are out of this area,” he said. What area? I asked him. “Lawrence’s area,” he said, speeding up.

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India is adrift in lawless waters. Sectarian violence is raging in the north-eastern state of Manipur. Insurgents are fighting against the Indian state in Kashmir, where army generals have been accused of personally supervising the torture of militants. In Uttarakhand, in northern India, a brutal campaign of cultural homogenisation is under way. (In one case last year, there were coordinated attacks by Hindus against their Muslim neighbours, forcing them to flee the village.) In central India, young Hindu men patrol the highways, frequently harassing, and sometimes lynching, anyone they suspect of eating or transporting meat. Meanwhile, the ghettoisation of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat, where Modi served as chief minister for 12 years before rising to Delhi, is presented as an example for the rest of the country to learn from. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is a saffron-clad strongman who talks like a street criminal. A man widely accused of inciting the most violent riots in the national capital in this century was recently named the law minister of Delhi. The home minister of the country is a man who spent three months in jail, having been arrested for murder. (The charges were later dropped.)

In India today, where an atmosphere of official impunity is combined with the ever-present threat of violence, Bishnoi is an icon as recognisable as Bollywood superstars and members of the men’s cricket team. Indian gangsters of yore, such as Dawood Ibrahim, the don of the Mumbai underworld in the 90s, were dreaded personalities, who lived glamorous but ruined lives outside the country, on the run from the law. But even from jail, Bishnoi has become a role model for millions of angry young men. To them, following the law increasingly appears to be for losers, bores and fools. As the government has failed to create jobs for the great masses of unemployed youth, Bishnoi has come to exemplify a nihilistic ideology born of desperation: grab what you can, by any means necessary.

Since his most publicised targets and victims are mostly Muslims and Sikhs – both suspect in the Hindu nationalist imagination – Lawrence Bishnoi has been celebrated by the mainstream press as a “Hindu don”, who strikes terror in the hearts of the enemies of India, from Sikh separatists to Muslim fifth columnists. Primetime news coverage has highlighted his Hindu credentials: vegetarian diet, celibate lifestyle, a scowling Hindu god tattooed on his biceps. A streaming platform, Zee5, just announced a “docuseries” on Bishnoi’s life, titled Lawrence of Punjab, which will further burnish this image.

Anonymous sources in the NIA have told the press that Bishnoi believes himself to be “a warrior for the ‘Hindu cause’, which he believes offers him a degree of protection in the current regime”. Yet Bishnoi’s connection to the Indian government runs deeper than a common religious affinity.

Bishnoi was already a national celebrity when, in October 2024, only days after the murder of Baba Siddique, he rose to international infamy. Testifying at a public inquiry about foreign interference in Ottawa, the then Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, named him, personally, for perpetrating violence against Canadians. Most shocking of all, Bishnoi was allegedly acting on the behest of the Indian government. Trudeau said that Indian diplomats had been “collecting information on Canadians who are opponents of the Modi government, passing along that information to the highest levels of the Indian government, and then having that information directed through criminal organisations like the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, to then result in violence against Canadians on the ground”.

That a man can run his criminal enterprise from jail is nothing new. But the allegations levelled by Canadian authorities seemed to indicate something altogether more striking: that Bishnoi was carrying out assassinations on foreign soil on behalf of the Indian government.

The Indian government summarily dismissed Trudeau’s allegations, pointing out that Ottawa had provided no evidence to back them up. Yet in my conversations with intelligence officials in New Delhi I could sense – for they would never outright say – a different understanding of the story, a version more consonant with the way Modi’s India sees itself. A former officer of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the spy agency responsible for foreign intelligence, summed it up neatly. India is now the world’s fourth largest economy, and it is an ally of the US that happens to be situated on China’s doorstep. “We can do this now,” I was told by the former agent, “because we have the influence to be able to get away with it.”

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Lawrence Bishnoi is an unusual name. It was his fair complexion that led the boy’s parents to name him after Sir Henry Lawrence, an officer of the East India Company in 19th-century Punjab, who founded Lawrence School in Sanawar, which is among the oldest and most prestigious boarding schools in India. Lawrence did not go to the eponymous boarding school 200 miles away, enrolling instead in the local school in Dutarawali, where his family owned more than 40 hectares of land. A shrine dedicated to his grandfather stands in the village.

The word Bishnoi is a portmanteau of two Hindi words, bees and nau – twenty and nine – and the Bishnois are a Hindu community in north-western India who live their life by 29 principles, which cover rituals of praying and fasting, purity and vegetarianism, and a zealous commitment to environmentalism. The community commemorates martyrs such as Amrita Devi, who was decapitated in the 18th century for trying to save the khejri trees that the king of Marwar wanted to cut down for firewood. Growing up, Lawrence felt a great affinity to this tradition.

The government secondary school is located in a small yard surrounded by wheat fields, next to a small, sickly green pond where buffaloes bathe. There is a crematorium at the back. The school was closed on the day of my visit, but Happy Bishnoi remembered being a student here alongside Lawrence. Corporal punishment is an integral part of the educational experience for most Indian kids – growing up in Rajasthan, I was regularly beaten with sticks for failing to do my homework – and the same was true in Dutarawali, Happy told me. The teachers “used to have fights with their wives at home and then come to the school to take it out on us,” he said.

But thanks mainly to the status of his family, no teacher would dare raise his hand to Lawrence, Happy told me. Other students also treated him with deference. From a very young age, Lawrence was used to exceptional treatment. In his teenage years, he enrolled in a convent school in the nearby city of Abohar, another Bishnoi stronghold, where he was known for wearing branded clothes and riding his motorcycle.

In 2010, at the age of 17, Bishnoi left for Chandigarh, the regional capital, to study law at the prestigious Panjab University. Only 180 miles away, Chandigarh might as well have been another country from the dusty streets and wheat fields Bishnoi used to traverse on horseback as a teenager. The city was designed in the 1950s by the French-Swiss modernist Le Corbusier as a symbol of newly independent India’s aspiration to break away from its past. It is a city of alphanumeric addresses, manicured gardens and transplanted trees. From the student accommodation where Bishnoi lived, to the college where he enrolled as a law student, is a 30-minute walk through the central avenue of the city’s regimental grid. The walk itself is a study in ascendant wealth; the houses getting fancier, the cars more expensive. What breaks the monotony of high walls is not any subversive graffiti but caste names scribbled on the walls with paint or coal, harking back to a communal tradition that Chandigarh was designed to break away from, and posters for local student elections.

At Panjab University, student politics can mean “being sucked into a world of nascent gangsterism”, said Manjit Singh, then a professor of sociology at the university. Singh, who himself moved from a small town to Panjab University in the 1970s, speculated that Bishnoi must have felt somewhat out of place when he arrived – and that his reaction was to try to dominate his new surroundings. Jupinderjit Singh, a Chandigarh-based journalist who has written extensively about gangsters in Punjab, had a similar theory. “Lawrence Bishnoi is like 5ft and 6 or 7in tall, but he’s got 100 acres of land, he is the Raja Babu of the family, he’s got a bike when he is in class 8,” Singh told me. “And then suddenly he is in Chandigarh: there are girls here, there is wealth here of a different kind, and no one really gives much of a shit about him. Here the attraction is not land, it is money, it is status, a social identity, and he does not have that.”

Things changed for Bishnoi when a senior student leader from a similar background, Vicky Middukhera, took him under his wing. (Middukhera, a well-known gangster in Panjab’s student politics, would eventually be gunned down by rivals in 2021.) In 2010, Bishnoi ran for chair of the student council, and lost, only to secure a win the next year. In this milieu, Manjit Singh told me, you prove yourself through acts of violence: “You don’t just pretend to be tough, you act.”

By the time he became student council leader, several cases were already registered against Bishnoi, including robbery, arson and intimidation. His first notable crime was burning the car of a rival student leader in Chandigarh. To escape the police, he moved to Rajasthan, about 350 miles away. During this period, he later told police, Middukhera provided him money and introduced him to other gangsters. Another friend from this time was Goldy Brar, who is today among the most notorious figures in Bishnoi’s gang.

In February 2014, while on his way to a religious shrine in Rajasthan, Bishnoi had a road accident. When a driver started to yell at him, Bishnoi and his friend took out their guns and fired shots in the air to shut him up. A case of attempted murder was registered against them, and Bishnoi was put in jail while awaiting trial. Later that year, on his way for a court appearance in police custody, members of his gang intercepted the police vehicle and opened fire at officers.

Bishnoi managed to escape but two months later, the police discovered him living under a fake identity in Gurugram, just south of New Delhi. Ever since then, Bishnoi has been in jail, though he has only ever been convicted of minor offences, such as extortion and illegal possession of arms. Today, there are about 40 cases pending against him in India, and he is charged with everything from armed robbery to cross-border drug smuggling and collaborating with terrorists. In most of these, the charges have not yet been set out against him, and according to his lawyer, aren’t going to be any time soon. Thanks to laws passed by the Modi government that allow the police to imprison people in preventive custody without due process, Bishnoi can be kept in jail indefinitely.

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Before he moved to Chandigarh, the most formative experience of Bishnoi’s life, in his own telling, came in 1998 – and he was many hundreds of miles away from where it took place. That October, word spread among the Bishnoi community that Salman Khan, an immensely famous Bollywood star, was in Rajasthan hunting blackbucks, an endangered species of antelope sacred to the Bishnois.

Ramesh Bishnoi, an elder cousin of Lawrence, was visiting Delhi when he first heard of Khan’s hunting expedition. “Immediately we left Delhi, travelled all night and reached Jodhpur [in western Rajasthan, where Khan was filming a new movie],” he told me.

Ramesh is a short, gaunt man in his 50s, with a lampshade moustache and a bald dome. We met in Abohar, at a centre for a Bishnoi group that works for the protection of wildlife. It was a balmy afternoon, and in the two hours we spent talking in the yard, we kept shifting our plastic chairs to be in the shifting shadow of the trees.

“[Khan and his friends] went to a village called Kankani, a Bishnoi village, where blackbucks roam in great hoards,” Ramesh told me. “When the villagers heard the shots being fired during the night, they got on their motorcycles and tractors to find out.” Soon they came across Khan and his friends, but the Bollywood star sped away in a white Jeep, said Ramesh.

This was the beginning of a protracted legal battle that continues to this day. Khan has maintained that the blackbucks had died of natural causes, and that he was framed by people who want to defame him. In 2006, a trial court found Khan guilty of killing the blackbucks, and sentenced him to five years in prison, only for the high court to suspend the sentence.

While the elder Bishnois continue to pursue Khan in the courts, Lawrence, who was four at the time, has taken it upon himself to avenge what he saw as a slight by Khan against the entire Bishnoi community. “He has belittled us,” Lawrence said in an interview he gave from jail to a national news channel in 2023. “We will give him a strong response in our own way,” he continued. “We will not be dependent upon courts or whatever.” (Prisoners are not supposed to be able to give major televised interviews, of course. When asked how he could be on a video call, Lawrence simply replied: “We manage.”)

The interviewer asked if he was making such threats to further burnish his criminal reputation. Lawrence brushed that aside. “There is no shortage of celebrities in Bollywood,” he said. “We could kill anyone who is walking around in Juhu beach. Don’t you think we are capable?” His point was that the threats were not about raising his gang’s profile, but about a specific grievance with a specific person.

In 2022, Khan’s father reportedly received a threatening note saying that he would be killed along with his son. In 2024, outside Khan’s apartment building in Mumbai, shots were fired by members of the Bishnoi gang. In October of the same year, after three unidentified shooters gunned down Baba Siddique in Mumbai, a member of Bishnoi’s gang wrote on social media: “Salman Khan, we did not want this war. We did it as a righteous act … Anyone who helps Salman Khan … should have their will sorted out.” (However, some, including Siddique’s son, believe that the link to Khan may be a red herring, and that the killers may have been acting on behalf of Siddique’s business and political rivals.)

In his TV interview, Lawrence offered a way out for Khan: if he goes to a specific Bishnoi temple and apologises to a deity for hurting the sentiments of the community, Lawrence will not seek vengeance. Ramesh clarified: “The cases will continue against Khan, we will continue to pursue him legally, only this current situation [of Khan being on Lawrence’s hitlist] can change if he apologises.”

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The rise of Bishnoi has been coterminous with the Modi era, a time when India has tried to project itself as a global superpower, in its foreign policy as well as in covert operations. The allegedly Bishnoi-orchestrated killing of the Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb in 2023, was part of a broader campaign to silence Indian dissidents abroad. The same week that Nijjar was killed, US authorities had thwarted a plot allegedly hatched by India’s spy agency, the RAW, to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, another Sikh separatist and a noted critic of the Modi government based in New York. These attacks were prefaced by a series of operations by the RAW in Pakistan. According to the Washington Post, since 2021, at least “11 Sikh or Kashmiri separatists living in exile and labeled terrorists by the Modi government have been killed”.

Both Canada and the US have alleged that the plots against Nijjar and Pannun were approved by individuals at the highest levels of the Indian government. In 2024, Canada’s then deputy foreign affairs minister, David Morrison, stated that the government believes Amit Shah, India’s home minister and Modi’s closest aide, to be the architect of the campaign of violence against Sikh separatists; yet no proof has been supplied.

Given the lack of hard evidence, it is easy to dismiss the charges as nonsense, as the Indian foreign ministry did, but the people I spoke with in India’s diplomatic and intelligence community were less sure. “Pretty much all the work that we do has an inbuilt element of deniability,” a former high-ranking member of the RAW told me in Delhi. According to a Canadian official who spoke to the Washington Post in 2024, when Canada presented evidence to Modi’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, that India had enlisted Bishnoi’s gang to carry out the Nijjar killing and other attacks, Doval pretended not to know who Bishnoi was. “Later,” the Post reported, “Doval began rattling off ‘facts, figures and anecdotes’ about Bishnoi, acknowledging that he ‘was capable of orchestrating violence from wherever he is incarcerated’.”

AS Dulat, a former special director of the Indian Intelligence Bureau, looked genuinely pained when I asked him about Canada’s allegations. “I might have to lie to you, because I can’t let down the agencies,” he told me in his apartment in Delhi. “You can talk about rogue elements, but at least in my time this kind of a decision could not be taken without the approval from the very top – by that I mean the prime minister.” Dulat had worked closely with the former BJP prime minister, AB Vajpayee. “I can tell you for certain that he would not have countenanced this sort of thing,” he said. Dulat made clear he didn’t know what had happened. “The only thing I can say,” he continued, “is that if you think you can do this sort of thing and get away with it, then you need to be pretty smart. And in this case, there certainly were goof-ups.”

We may never get to know what precisely those goof-ups were, or whether or not the government of India carried out a killing in a foreign country. For a sense of how little can be learned from the official documents of the cases, note that the Indian government’s investigative agencies have instead charged Bishnoi with working for the Sikh separatists based in Canada and Pakistan, the very same people that Ottawa accuses him of terrorising in Canada.

In India’s geopolitical games, Lawrence Bishnoi may just be a pawn. But he seems to be content with his situation. “We do not want to be rehabilitated to the mainstream society,” he said in the 2023 interview, using the royal we while talking about himself. “We are very happy where we are.”

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In the absence of any verifiable information, Bishnoi lives most vividly in the stories and myths that swirl around him. When I went to meet his lawyer in a fancy part of Delhi, I found lawyers sitting outside the office, sipping cups of tea after the courts had closed for the day. They smiled when I told them I was writing a story about Lawrence Bishnoi. “Here is what you should write about him,” said the best dressed among them, who wore a spotless neckband. “He has done nothing wrong. Most of the people he is accused of killing had it coming one way or another.” He explained: “Moosewala, a known gangster who only liked women and fast cars; Baba Siddiqui, a corrupt politician; Salman Khan, less said about him the better; and Khalistanis [who have been campaigning for a separate Sikh state carved out of Punjab], who are traitors.” He stared at me: “Understand? Lawrence is not a gangster. Lawrence is karma,” he said, casting Bishnoi as a divine agent of Hindu morality who ensures that everyone gets what is coming to them.

Yet for others, he represents something more basic: a raw source of power in a world where wealth shimmers continually before their eyes, tantalisingly out of reach. In Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, where Lawrence was first arrested, I found myself drinking with an extended circle of friends I had gone to college with. The group could be broadly divided into three types: those who did not come from money, who were making a meagre living on the lower rungs of India’s professional class; those who came from money and were living directionless lives as minor landlords or businessmen; and those who neither came from money nor had managed to become part of the salaried class, most of whom were working as barely paid attaches to local political honchos. All were men.

We were on a rooftop of a cheap hotel, in a neighbourhood where the city’s first shopping mall had opened when I was a boy in the 2000s. Two decades ago, our aspirations largely involved going to the McDonald’s and buying cassette tapes from Planet M. Since then, a dozen other malls have mushroomed around it, housing American clothing brands, luxury car dealerships and high-end gyms with monthly memberships that cost about the same as renting an average apartment in the city.

Having left India, I was a bit of a curiosity among the group. How is life in New York, they asked. How is dating in New York? Are white women loose? Had I driven a GMC Denali? Why, most of all, had I come back? When I explained that I was writing a story about Lawrence Bishnoi, the direction of our discussion was set, as we got drunk on bottles of Old Monk rum and Kingfisher beer.

“He is going to kill Salman Khan,” one of the men said. “And that motherfucker should be killed,” another added. “But he shouldn’t have killed Sidhu Moosewala,” the third added. That was the point when I realised that the rooftop speakers had been playing Moosewala’s songs, which glamourise a culture of violence and excess, and frequently mention big guns and cars. (That was the source of the question about the GMC Denali.)

At some point around midnight, a couple of us went on a drive to buy cigarettes. Roads in Jaipur, as elsewhere in India, are barricaded at night for no apparent reason, with policemen sitting beside them, yawning through the night. You can pass without inviting attention, but the man I was with turned up his car speakers to a volume that made my passenger seat vibrate. Naturally, we were stopped. The man I was with hopped out of the car, exchanged a joke with the policeman. A few moments later, we drove away to the cigarette shop. “In this area, we know every policeman,” he told me with a grin. It felt like the whole act was a performance, an act to measure yourself against the power and authority of the police, a way to remind yourself that you were someone in this world (and perhaps a way to tell me that if I were alone, I wouldn’t have got away with that). When we came back to the hotel terrace, the drinking circle was still occupied with Lawrence Bishnoi.

One of the wealthier men claimed, improbably, that he had spoken to Lawrence recently. He claimed that another friend, someone I vaguely recalled from my childhood, had moved into the world of crime, and is in fact a part of Lawrence’s gang. “He called Lawrence bhai [brother], and gave the phone to me,” the man said, as he took a swig of rum. He wiped his mouth, lit a cigarette. “Lawrence bhai said that he does not have much time left in this life any more. He thinks that he has been used, that he has served his purpose, and that he will be lifted off this earth any time now.”

“But while he was alive, he lived a life worth living,” announced someone who worked in an unofficial capacity for a local politician. “Look at us, what kind of life are we living?”

“At least we are not in jail,” the wealthy man offered.

This did not seem to lift his spirits. We were into the small hours of the night by now. He got up from his chair, and with eyes that were practically bubbling with rum, stared at the buildings all around us, shining bright in the black night, with floodlit billboards of Audi, Mercedes and American Eagle.

“These buildings,” he finally said, “these buildings, they are saying something to me.” What are they saying, I asked. We were all watching him now. The man, still looking away from us, replied with complete seriousness: “They are saying to me that I must seize them somehow.”

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