The unguarded prison plots of Lawrence Bishnoi

In 2018, a video popped up in which a fresh-faced young man, flanked by policemen, calmly issued a death threat to a superstar. “Salman Khan ka karenge, maarenge yahin. Jodhpur mein hi maarenge. Pata lag jayega (We’ll do Salman Khan, we’ll kill him here in Jodhpur. That’ll show everyone),” said Lawrence Bishnoi on camera. With his boyish good looks and slight frame, Bishnoi did not cut an imposing figure. His hostility towards Khan seemed absurd, especially when one kept in mind that Bishnoi had been five years old in 1998 when Khan had been charged with illegally hunting two blackbucks, which are considered sacred by the Bishnoi sect. (Khan was acquitted for lack of evidence in 2016.)

If anyone had dismissed Bishnoi as an attention-seeker looking to piggyback on the fame of a Bollywood A-lister, they’d misjudged him. 

By 2018, Bishnoi had already acquired a decade’s worth of experience in violent crime and was on his way to becoming the kingpin in an international criminal network. He had attracted the attention of leading gangsters and was establishing contacts that would later enable him to carry out high-profile assassinations. In 2024, Bishnoi’s enmity with Khan would be presented as the motive behind Baba Siddique being shot to death on the streets of Mumbai on October 12. 

Within hours of the shocking incident, a cryptic post appeared briefly on Facebook, claiming responsibility for Siddique’s killing and suggesting the politician had been targeted for his proximity to Khan. “Salman Khan, we did not want this war but you made our brother lose his life... We have no personal enmity with anyone. However, anyone who helps Salman Khan, if anyone gets any of our brothers killed, we will respond,” posted a handle named Shubuu Lonkar Maharashtra, believed to be sharpshooter Shubham Lonkar. Lonkar has previously said he is an associate of Bishnoi. His brother Pravin is one of the three arrested accused in Siddique’s shooting.  

If Bishnoi is behind this assassination, it would be the latest in a long list of crimes the gangster has planned and executed from his prison cell.  

A start in student politics

Born in 1992 to an affluent family in Dotaranwali village in Punjab’s Fazilka district, Bishnoi had an unremarkable childhood. Surinder Kumar, sarpanch of Dotaranwali village, spoke highly of Bishnoi's parents, Lovinder Bishnoi and Sunita Devi. “Both his father and mother are humble people who own about 120 acres of ancestral land and are well off. They wanted a brighter future for their sons,” he said. Of the various stories explaining his unusual first name, one is that Bishnoi’s mother named him after The Lawrence School in Sanawar in the hope of sending him there as a student. “Lawrence was once a well-behaved and smart boy, but everything changed when he went to Chandigarh,” said Kumar.