Out With Old, In With The New: Lawrence Bishnoi's Mumbai Underworld Power Play

For over a decade, Mumbai enjoyed a calm that once seemed impossible.

The era of living under the shadow of gangsters, extortion calls, daylight shootouts, and assassinations had faded with Dawood Ibrahim standing down his operations in 2003 and others, like Arun Gawli, Chhota Rajan, and Abu Salem in prison serving life sentences. The underworld had fallen silent.

Even smaller, though no less notorious, figures like Ravi Pujari had been neutralised.

But history has a habit of repeating itself when vigilance wanes.

The recent incident outside filmmaker Rohit Shetty's home forced Mumbai to confront an uncomfortable question - is the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, a criminal network with contacts worldwide, trying to step into the vacuum left behind by collapsed old Mumbai gangs?

A city that thought the worst was behind it

• In 2002 the D-Company, Dawood's gang, fired its last gunshot in Mumbai.
• 2008 was the last time the Arun Gawli gang was named in a murder case.
• Three years later Chhota Rajan's final major strike was the killing of journalist J Dey.
• Abu Salem's criminal network withered after his arrest.
• Ashwin Naik left the world of crime to become a builder.

By this time the musclemen of the 1990s were either dead, imprisoned, or irrelevant, and Mumbai's criminal networks collapsed without a successor.

But such vacuums rarely remain unoccupied.

Enter Lawrence Bishnoi.

Over the past 18 months, firing outside actor Salman Khan's home, the assassination of NCP MLA Baba Siddique, and the shooting outside Rohit Shetty's residence point to a calculated attempt to establish a new regime of fear.

Whether Bishnoi - running his gang from jail - ordered the Shetty attack is unclear.

Lawrence Bishnoi gang claimed responsibility for gunfire outside Rohit Shetty's home.

But one fact is unmistakable - his gang's footprint in Maharashtra is expanding and it is aggressively recruiting local youth, which is how the original gangs consolidated power.

READ | "Wait, Watch": Bishnoi Gang's Warning After Rohit Shetty House Firing

In claiming responsibility for these attacks, the gang also adopted a common strategy -project ideological and communal colours to win legitimacy or psychological dominance.

Just as Chhota Rajan fashioned himself as a 'nationalist don' after the 1993 blasts and just as Ravi Pujari threatened Left-leaning celebrities to craft a similar image, Bishnoi seems keen to project himself as a 'Hindu gangster', made clear by social media posts loaded with slogans.

NDTV Special | Murders And Mobile Phones: About Bishnoi And His Gang

The pattern mirrors the earliest phases of the 1990s gang wars.

First come symbolic attacks - firing on known personalities, public threats, intimidation on social media. If unchallenged, this escalates into widespread extortion and targeted killings of bar owners, builders, film producers, and local businessmen.

Dawood Ibrahim, believed to be in Pak, led the dreaded D-Company syndicate (File).

All were once routine targets, and the murder of a businessman outside the Police Commissioner's office in the 1990s had marked the peak of that madness.

Are we seeing the first tremors of that cycle again?

The cops eventually crushed the old gangs through crackdowns, most controversially through 'encounters' that killed nearly 500 gangsters and led to thousands of arrests.

But that generation of officers, those who understood the networks, the informants, the psychology of gangland warfare, has largely retired and today's crop faces a different enemy.

They face gangs not based in traditional neighborhoods and operate via a decentralised network that uses social media to spread fear. They face gangs using targeted recruitment strategy and a crime boss who operates despite being jailed, in another state.

Rebuilding an informer network won't be easy and recognising patterns harder.