Lawrence Bishnoi, shown in 2022, is the leader of the Bishnoi Gang. Canada has designated the gang as a terrorist organization.Hindustan Times/AFP/Getty Images
The handheld video is shaky, but the message is clear. As two vehicles burn in the driveway, a shooter aims his pistol into the home of Punjabi-Canadian singer AP Dhillon and begins firing – 14 shots shattering the nighttime silence of a sleepy Victoria suburb.
The non-fatal shooting was filmed on a cellphone and posted online by one of two men who committed the September, 2024, attack. Within two months, police in Ontario arrested 25-year-old Abjeet Kingra, but what was more noteworthy was who he said had hired him.
When Mr. Kingra was sentenced last week in B.C. Provincial Court, the judge ruled that the Winnipeg-based man had traversed Canada terrorizing people on behalf of the Bishnoi Gang – a shadowy Indian criminal network that Canada classified, just this week, as a terrorist organization.
India silent on how Canada’s terrorist listing of Bishnoi gang will affect warming ties
For years, violent incidents like these have been the stock and trade of the gang, which police say is increasingly targeting affluent members of Canada’s South Asian community for extortion. Their business hinges on fear and intimidation and police here acknowledge they have had major difficulties stopping a group based halfway around the globe that is now inspiring homegrown Canadian copycats.
The federal government’s designation gives police new powers to seize the group’s property, vehicles and money, and involve federal agencies more easily. Investigators say they needed more powerful tools to tackle this new kind of decentralized criminal organization that defies borders and conventional gang structures, but doesn’t necessarily fit the traditional definition of a politically motivated terrorist group.
The Bishnoi group’s rise from relative obscurity into an international crime syndicate seems pulled from the pages of a Bollywood script. Its leader Lawrence Bishnoi, the 32-year-old son of an Indian police officer, was born into a well-to-do family that owned a sizable farm near the Pakistan border. He went to Chandigarh’s Panjab University to study law, but developed a reputation for violence instead.
Policemen escort Lawrence Bishnoi at a court in New Delhi in 2023.ANI/Reuters
In 2010, he was charged with attempted murder, assault and arson for clashing with a rival during contentious student council elections, which he won. His rise and alleged influence has been reported breathlessly by Indian media. Panjab University has a history of student riots, and in this tough environment, Mr. Bishnoi, an accomplished athlete, learned how to use intimidation to edge out his opponents, according to Indian media reports and biographer Jupinderjit Singh, who has covered India’s gang wars for nearly a decade.
Imprisoned for his crimes on campus, Mr. Bishnoi became a professional criminal, overseeing a group that sold Afghan heroin and extorted prominent Punjabis, according to media reports. Despite being behind bars since 2014, Mr. Bishnoi has increased his criminal network to about 700 members, to whom he issues orders via encrypted messages on borrowed cellphones, according to a 2024 profile by Al Jazeera. His gang became known for rapping on social media, flashing their guns and using Facebook to threaten their victims.
In 2022, the gang’s daytime killing of India’s biggest rap star, Sidhu Moose Wala – a Punjabi performer who started his music career while a student in Brampton, Ont. – stunned India and helped give the Bishnoi group a fearsome reputation it has exploited as part of its extortion efforts.
About a year and a half later, in 2023, police in the Vancouver suburb of Abbotsford revealed that wealthy businesspeople there were being targeted by people claiming to be Bishnoi gangsters who shot up their homes after they failed to pay large sums of money.
Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moose Wala was shot dead in India in 2022.Supplied
With its large Indian diaspora, Canada’s affluent south Asian communities have increasingly become targets, with gang members often threatening people’s families back in the old country. Police in places such as Brampton, Edmonton and Surrey, B.C., say those threats have earned the gang tens of millions of dollars.
“They viewed Canada as a place where they can derive revenue and were able to operate with relative impunity to the point that you’d see cars driving around with the Bishnoi label, where you’d have criminals openly and brazenly saying that they’re associated with Bishnoi,” Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, told The Globe.
In Peel Region, which includes Brampton and Mississauga, recent crackdowns on the Bishnoi Gang and its copycats have netted 48 arrests, 267 charges, $4-million in seized assets, 10 stolen cars and 28 guns, police say.
“People were getting phone calls, business owners were getting phone calls, and were being threatened with violence if they didn’t pay money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Peel Regional Police deputy chief Nick Milinovich said.
“In many of those calls, the people on the other end of the line would reference the Lawrence Bishnoi gang.”
Peel Regional Police deputy chief Nick Milinovich says people in the Peel Region were being threatened by callers referencing the Bishnoi Gang.Supplied
Among Mr. Bishnoi’s closest associates from university was a man named Satwinder Singh, alias Goldy Brar – a notorious gangster who would become his top lieutenant in Canada, and linked to multiple high-profile slayings and shootings in both countries. He has appeared on a list of wanted people that Canadian police use to apprehend alleged fugitives, and has taken credit for the slaying of Mr. Moose Wala. In an interview with the BBC about that killing, Mr. Brar said his organization had “no option but to kill” Mr. Moose Wala.
Separating myth from reality with the Bishnoi gang can sometimes be difficult. It is often hard for investigators to prove whether the extortionists in Canada are acting on behalf of this global network or just invoking the Bishnoi bogeyman in their threatening WhatsApp messages and phone calls, which often are traced overseas. Police in Metro Vancouver, dealing with more than 50 extortion-related incidents recent years, concede it’s difficult to get a clear picture of the group’s actual activity in the region.
Bishnoi gangsters are unlike many of their counterparts in other criminal gangs, who gather en masse to publicly mourn their fallen co-conspirators, have well-known tattoos denoting membership or even pose for group photos that are supremely helpful in deciphering their hierarchy, according to Surrey Police Service spokesperson Staff Sergeant Lindsey Houghton.
“It’s very amorphous, it appears very decentralized – they don’t have a clubhouse, they don’t meet for ‘church night,’ they don’t wear Bishnoi gang hoodies,” said Staff Sgt. Houghton, who previously spent a dozen years with B.C.’s specialized gang unit.
Claims made on social media that Mr. Bishnoi is behind these acts of violence have to be taken with a “giant grain of salt,” he added, noting the recent shooting of a popular café caused people from competing gangs to say they were behind it.
Gary Mason: Naming Bishnoi gang a terrorist entity was necessary, but political peril remains
In interviews from jail, Mr. Bishnoi has presented himself as a Hindu nationalist and appears to be no fan of Sikh efforts to establish an independent homeland in India’s Punjab region called Khalistan. But while in Canada the majority of the gang’s extortion victims have been Sikh, according to Deputy Chief Milinovich, there appears to be no overt religious character to the Bishnoi Gang.
“They ultimately just want to make money. They’re up for sale, but because of the nature of their organization, they will also take on work that will be targeted towards an identifiable group,” Mr. Brown said.
Sikh leaders in Canada have long alleged the gang does the dirty work of the Indian government, targeting prominent Khalistani activists abroad. Last October, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau echoed those allegations. Testifying at the inquiry into foreign interference, Mr. Trudeau said that Indian diplomats collected intelligence on “Canadians who are opponents or in disagreement with the Modi government,” information he said was shared with “criminal organizations like the Lawrence Bishnoi gang to then result in violence against Canadians on the ground.”
India has rejected this assertion, and points to the fact that Canada has refused to act on extradition requests for Bishnoi gang members operating within its borders. The government of Narendra Modi has so far declined to comment on the group’s new terrorist designation, as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s administration tries to rebuild its strained ties with the Asian superpower.
Moninder Singh, a spokesperson for Sikh Federation and a close friend of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh leader who was gunned down in Surrey in 2023, said he and many other Sikh Canadians believe the Bishnoi Gang is a puppet of the ruling Indian BJP party that carries out repression of its critics abroad. But India will deny any relationship with the Bishnoi Gang and attribute any of its actions on Canadian soil to a domestic problem for Canada to solve, he said.
A banner with the image of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar at the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple in Surrey, B.C., where he was killed in 2023.CHRIS HELGREN/Reuters
Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and an expert on intelligence and defence at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says the terrorist designation would need to be based on evidence that the Bishnoi Gang represents a threat to national security. Canada has allowed the problem to fester, he added, doing little to stop transnational criminal organizations from taking root here.
“My guess is that CSIS was able to convince the government that the violence that we’re seeing in Canada is, in one way or another, linked to political objectives,” he said.
“But even with that designation, I don’t have a lot of hope that we’ll actually be able to root this out in Canada. And of course, this is a problem we’ve created ourselves over the last decade or so.”
The group has also made inroads in the U.S. Last fall, Anmol Bishnoi, the brother of Mr. Bishnoi who fled India with 32 criminal cases against him for kidnapping, extortion and murder, was arrested in California allegedly using a fake passport and placed in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Iowa.
California Assemblywoman Dr. Jasmeet Bains said his arrest sparked fear among her state’s sizable Sikh population given a worrying wave of extortions, threats and surveillance already happening there, which some link to India.
“I had heard that they were trying to flourish in California, but I don’t think it really hit home until I saw that that capture was in California,” said Dr. Bains, in a phone interview.
Dr. Bains introduced a state bill that is now waiting to be signed into law by the governor which would give police more tools to investigate, disrupt and deter these activities and the transnational repression many feel these crimes create.
The U.S., however, has made no indication it intends to follow Canada’s lead and designate the Bishnoi Gang a terrorist organization. Prof. Leuprecht says that’s probably because it has a much different relationship with New Delhi than Ottawa does.
“If you’re the U.S., you don’t need to escalate. It could be your law enforcement and your criminal intelligence has a reasonable handle on the problem, or, it might also be that India got the message much more quickly,” he said.