In early 2025, gunmen fired at Indian actor Tiger Shroff's vehicle in Mumbai, injuring his driver. The attackers claimed ties to Lawrence Bishnoi, a 33-year-old gangster who has been incarcerated since 2014 but allegedly directs operations from prison via concealed phones and messaging apps. The shooting is the latest in a string of attacks on Bollywood figures that includes shots fired at Salman Khan's apartment (2022), filmmaker Rohit Shetty's home, actor Disha Patani's family home, an extortion demand of nearly $1.1 million against actor Ranveer Singh, and three attacks on comedian Kapil Sharma's cafe in Surrey, Canada. The Bishnoi network is structurally unlike the Mumbai underworld of the 1990s. That era's gangs — led by figures like Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem, and Chhota Shakeel — were embedded in the city, running integrated criminal enterprises from smuggling to match-fixing to film financing. They invested in Bollywood to launder money and control production. When producers resisted, the consequences were fatal: music mogul Gulshan Kumar was shot dead in 1997, filmmaker Rakesh Roshan was shot in 2000, and 101 businessmen were killed in Mumbai in 1998 alone — roughly one every three days. A police crackdown led by then-Commissioner D. Sivanandhan, reinforced by a 1999 organized crime law, broke the old gangs by the early 2000s using electronic surveillance, preventive detention, and the seizure of some 2,500 illegal weapons. But the vacuum they left is now being exploited. Bishnoi comes from an affluent landowning family in Punjab, not Mumbai. He built what journalist Jupinderjit Singh describes as one of the first criminal syndicates spanning several northern Indian states, recruiting mostly poor young men online with promises of money, protection, and weapons. The Bishnoi operation has an international dimension. In September 2025, Canada designated the Bishnoi gang a terrorist entity. The FBI added Satinderjeet Singh, known as Goldy Brar, to its Ten Most Wanted list last month, offering up to $1 million for information leading to his arrest. US prosecutors described Brar as the alleged leader of Bishnoi's North American operations. The trigger for the Bollywood campaign appears personal. In 1998, Salman Khan was accused of killing a blackbuck, an antelope revered by Bishnoi's community. Bishnoi vowed revenge. Many attacks have targeted people close to Khan, including the 2024 killing of politician Baba Siddique, which police have linked to the gang. But experts see the feud as strategic cover. Crime journalist S. Hussain Zaidi calls the attacks primarily a publicity play: 'It's a way to grab headlines.' The security calculus is simple — fear is the raw material of extortion. Whether Bollywood is actually paying remains disputed. Zaidi notes that digital payments have made large cash transactions harder to conceal, limiting the old model of envelopes full of cash. Sivanandhan disagrees, arguing that 'cash-rich Bollywood would be coughing up so much, which is enough to run an army of people.' At any rate, the fear is real enough that the All Indian Cine Workers Association wrote to Home Minister Amit Shah warning that leading names may be forced to leave Mumbai if the threat continues. The pattern is clear: a decentralized, media-savvy criminal network is using targeted violence against high-profile soft targets to generate fear and extract money, operating remotely from prison and across international borders. Security forces appear on the back foot. Several Bollywood stars have already escalated their personal security, but the systemic response — how India manages a gang that operates through social media, recruits remotely, and commands operations from a prison cell in Gujarat — remains the open question.
