From Punjab campus to Jodhpur prison: How Lawrence Bishnoi's path led him to Salman Khan

Until 2013-14, the Punjab-based gangster’s network was confined to student politics, campus violence and extortion in the state.

A chase by the Punjab Police first pushed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi into Jaipur, where he graduated from campus violence to the liquor trade. An extortion attempt on a leading Rajasthan doctor then landed him in a Jodhpur prison, where he met members of the now Bishnoi clan. A murder case later brought him to a Jodhpur court on January 4, 2018, the same day Bollywood actor Salman Khan was in the court complex for a hearing in the blackbuck poaching case.

That was the day Bishnoi first threatened Khan. The timing was a coincidence but the enmity that keeps Khan under heavy security till today and has also led to deaths, was years in the making – shaped by fate and greed that brought Bishnoi from Punjab to Rajasthan.

When Khan allegedly hunted the blackbuck near Jodhpur between September 26 and October 2, 1998, Bishnoi was just seven years old, living in a village in Punjab’s Fazilka district. Over the last decade, he has repeatedly threatened to kill the actor, as the blackbuck is considered sacred by the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan. In recent years, police have stepped up Khan’s security and arrested Bishnoi’s aides for arranging weapons and conducting a recce outside the actor’s Bandra residence. In 2024, the Bishnoi gang also killed Nationalist Congress Party leader Baba Siddique, allegedly over his closeness to Khan and to establish the gang’s supremacy in Mumbai.

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Until 2013-14, the Punjab-based gangster’s network was confined to student politics, campus violence and extortion in the state. The seeds of his expansion into Rajasthan, and of his fixation with Khan, were sown in 2014, when he first entered the state as a fugitive from the Punjab Police.

HT looks at these minute details mentioned in one of Bishnoi’s 35 page confessions to the police in 2020 about his life of crime.

2014: No longer just a campus strongman

Bishnoi was first arrested in 2008 for allegedly assaulting a rival candidate in the Panjab University elections. Until 2010, when he was held on multiple counts of campus violence, and his criminal activities were limited to colleges in the state. He remained active in university politics from 2008 to 2014.

His second murder, in 2014, was also a fallout of university election politics, like the first. With two murders and several violence cases against him, Bishnoi could no longer stay in Punjab and slipped into Rajasthan to escape the heat.

According to his confession, he first fled to Jaipur in early 2014. “There he stayed for three to four months. One of his friends, Ravinder Punia, regularly gave him money for his expenses,” according to his confession. He also said Punia introduced him to a liquor shop owner named Amandeep alias Sonu.

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Amandeep is critical to Bishnoi’s story because he helped him graduate from campus violence to guns and the liquor business, first as a partner and later as an independent investor.

Amandeep also matters to the Bishnoi-Khan story because his murder drew the gangster deeper into Rajasthan, where he met members of the Bishnoi community and first heard about the 1998 blackbuck case.

While on the run from Punjab sometime in May-June 2014, Bishnoi had his first brush with the Rajasthan police when he and his aides fired at the cops who stopped them as they were driving to Balaji. Bishnoi was caught and sent to Sikar jail. He continued to make friends and grow his network in Rajasthan. Bishnoi maintained his hold over campus politics even while working with Amandeep, and was arrested and jailed multiple times.

2015: New alliances and revenge killings

When Bishnoi started making friends and forging alliances inside Punjab’s Ropar prison, he was primarily a Punjab-based gangster, with a few cases in Haryana and one in Rajasthan (the attack on the police team).

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Sometime in 2014, after Amandeep was murdered by the liquor mafia in Rajasthan, Bishnoi expanded his gang into the state and vowed revenge. His confession details at least two revenge murders during this time. Both murders are significant because they take him deeper to Rajasthan, where he meets the Bishnoi community members.