Editorial: Lawrence of Ludhiana

Budding investigative reporters are taught that if the facts are easy to get, they are likely false. This first principle is sure to come to mind to any reporter chasing the many Lawrence Bishnoi stories spinning in the media right now. The eagerness with which normally circumspect agencies are pouring out details of the life of this gangster must alert citizens to the plausibility that they are being subjected to obfuscation.

Lawrence Bishnoi, now lodged in the Sabarmati jail in Gujarat, is the central figure in three parallel narratives currently dominating the news cycle. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said last week it has evidence that his gang, acting at the behest of Indian government agents, was carrying out assassinations, coercive operations, and extortion activities against leaders of the pro-Khalistan movement in Canada, including the June 2023 murder of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Police say the Oct 12 killing of NCP (Ajit Pawar faction) politician Baba Siddique, who supposedly was a conduit between Bollywood and the Mumbai underworld, was the handiwork of the same gang. And then, Bishnoi himself is said to have sworn vengeance against the actor Salman Khan, who is accused of killing two blackbucks, animals that are sacred to the Bishnoi community, in 1998.

The evolving legend of Lawrence Bishnoi is full of incongruities that make it hard to nail down even the most basic facts, right down to his name. While some accounts say he was named Balkaran Brar at birth, others spin a romantic tale that his mother named him Lawrence after a British officer popular in Raj-era rural Punjab. His father is said to have been a constable, but one who owned 110 acres and so could afford to bring him up as a right royal Little Lord Fauntleroy schooled in social graces at expensive convent schools. His vow of vengeance against Salman Khan is not the least of the incongruities: When the actor shot dead those two blackbucks in 1996, Bishnoi was all of five years old.

Reports from his border village of Fazilka say he is remembered as a "well-behaved boy who never picked fights," which contrasts sharply with his sudden and magical transformation, apparently after introduction to student union politics at a law school in Chandigarh, into a notorious gangster with operations in Punjab, Rajasthan, UP and Mumbai while barely out of his teens. Bishnoi is 32 years old now and has spent a third of his life in jail. Yet, he has grown to command an expanding network of 700 operatives active in Canada, Australia, UK, Mumbai and the UAE.

The criminal success of Master Lawrence suggests that he has been aided by excellent communication, logistical and secretarial assistance in our maximum-security prisons. Bishnoi is said to use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls to communicate with gang members outside prison. Mumbai starlets freely seek to confer with him on Zoom, and he himself posts stirring nationalistic videos on social media, including a recital of the revolutionary poem ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna’ with a picture of Bhagat Singh in the backdrop.

The nationalist optics Bishnoi is seeking to project, the enthusiasm with which Siddique’s alleged assassins have confessed to links with Bishnoi, and the eagerness with which Hindu far right has adopted him as ‘our answer to Dawood Ibrahim’ reeks of the work of India’s agencies of dark arts. The fiction is flimsy, easy to suspect; it’s only meant to confuse perception for a while. And that is what passes for law enforcement work in India today.