In a country where nearly 20 million people are joining the labour force each year and where most of them can’t get jobs, it is but natural for disenchanted Indian youth to look to anti-establishment figures for inspiration. Atul Dev’s brilliantly written long-read for The Guardian is a report from the badlands of Punjab, Haryana & Rajasthan where such unemployed youth are forging a dystopian and blood-soaked society on the basis of guns & muscle. If you want to understand the reality of contemporary India, we suggest you read Mr Dev’s article in full.
Imprisoned gangster, Lawrence Bishnoi is a hero, an icon for young Indian men in the northern and western regions of the country. Mr Dev writes: “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…”
The second aspect of Mr Dev’s article which is interesting is the links he draws between Bishnoi and the powers that be in India: “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…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.””
And the third aspect of Atul Dev’s article which is really interesting is Bishnoi’s background – he comes from a wealthy landowner’s family in Punjab i.e. it is not financial need or unemployment which led to him being pulled into the world of crime. It was social norms. Mr Dev writes: “…thanks mainly to the status of his family, no teacher would dare raise his hand to Lawrence…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… 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….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…
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.”
Mr Dev’s article climaxes in a drinking session on the rooftop of a “cheap hotel” in Jaipur where local businessmen and political wheeler-dealers, both, profess their admiration for Lawrence Bishnoi and their desire to emulate him.
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