New Delhi: The US Department of Justice—with quite a bit of fanfare, and if I may add, a fair bit of self-congratulation—has unsealed three indictments (naming 37 defendants worldwide and detailing the global crime syndicate of jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi).
Indictment vs chargesheet: In the American system, an indictment is the equivalent of a chargesheet in India. In America, the prosecutor puts out an indictment for lesser case; serious cases need a grand jury indictment.
In this case, three grand jury indictments have been put out, totalling 111 pages. As in the Indian system, once a chargesheet is presented in court, the judge has to examine it and take cognizance, that is, the judge has to find it serious enough to frame charges. The American system is similar.
India-icted: These three indictments name 37 individuals, most of whom happen to be of Indian origin. Not all; there are a few Hispanic names there. There are Mexicans, and maybe people of Hispanic origin living in Canada and America.
Most are also living in the US, Canada or in Europe. Only a few are living in India. In fact, now only three of the named are in India, two of whom have been in jail for quite some time from where they’ve been running their operations.
Let’s first see who these indictments are against because the charges across the three are very similar. The American system of writing these indictments is very orderly. They will say charge 1, 2, 3… what the conspiracy was… what did they try to achieve…. what should they be given as punishment. And then it also goes on to add that anything or any wealth that they might have acquired as a consequence of their crimes should be forfeited. That is the overall structure of an American criminal indictment.
In this case, I will go by what is most significant for India. Some of these details are also in two videos that Ananya Bhardwaj, Editor of Internal Security Team, has done. This is no trial because this is not a TV channel. For some reason, however, TV channels have not paid too much attention to this story.
Lawrence of Sabarmati: Lawrence Bishnoi is the most important indictment for us: Bishnoi and his partner Satinderjeet Singh, alias Goldy Brar. Most of the people (in the indictments) have multiple aliases, some really funny although the story is not.
Lawrence Bishnoi is the only one who does not have an alias. Maybe because his first name is an alias. He wasn’t named Lawrence when he was born; he was named Balkaran. He was born in Haryana near the border with Punjab and then went to Panjab University. That’s my university, as it is (alleged Khalistani leader) Gurpatwant Singh Pannu’s, and Dr Manmohan Singh’s too. So don’t blame the university.
By this time, Balkaran had become Lawrence, and bored with being a mere student leader. He set up his own gang.
He is only 33 years old now. This indictment lists him as Conspirator No. 1. Then Satinderjeet Singh alias Goldy Brar as Conspirator No. 2 and the third is Rohit Godara, who has multiple aliases.
Satinderjit Singh has only one, Goldy Brar. Rohit Godara has Guru, Jai Shriram, Ravata Das and Pawan Kumar.
These members of Lawrence Bishnoi’s gang had areas divided between them. Goldy Brar, for example, was in charge of North America, meaning the US, Canada and Mexico at least.
Godara was in charge of Europe. He is still somewhere there; police forces of 35 or 36 countries are looking for him, including the US and Canada. Sukhraj Singh Kang was in charge of the operations in India, or is. Lawrence Bishnoi is currently lodged in the Sabarmati maximum security prison.
Kang is a key figure, and has multiple aliases. Also known as Rajan Bhatti, Victor, Kala, Vankit. That could be the Punjabi way of saying ‘Venkat’. He is also at large, probably in North America.
Wick-ed men: The second indictment is against Ravindra Singh Dhanda and his gang. Ravindra Singh Dhanda is at large. He has the most aliases: Randy, Rolex, Jim, Daytona. I bet he loves all of these. Maybe his mom loves all of these. Then he has a surprise alias: John Wick, the character that Keanu Reeves plays in an action film franchise that kicked off in 2014.
Dhanda’s organisation has actually been called the Dhanda Drug Trafficking Organisation; he’s been dealing in bulk with cocaine and meth, or methamphetamine, the stuff they were cooking in the TV series Breaking Bad.
Now for the third indictment, which has its own kind of significance, specifically for India. (This is against) Jaggu Bhagwanpuria, Jaggu coming from Jagdeep.
Jagdeep Bhagwanpuria also runs his gang from a prison in India, a maximum security prison in distant Silchar, Assam. Among his key partners is Gurlal Singh who also goes by the aliases Gurlal Radhiana and Gullu.
Interestingly, this list of co-conspirators has the only female name in the three indictments: Mandeep Kaur.
Playing ball: What’s the larger story in these indictments? First, this is something that the US, Canadian, British and European law enforcement agencies have been working on for a very long time, at it at least since 2023.
This extensive operation was called Operation Hardball. It was on 18 June 2023 when Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a separatist in Surrey, British Columbia, was assassinated. It appears that these agencies got interested in these networks at this point, if not earlier, because it was evident that the killing was done by hired guns. Who hired them was the issue.
Justin Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada and no lover of Narendra Modi or India, was very reliant on the Sikh vote there. The Sikh vote in Canada is very concentrated in a number of constituencies, or ridings as these are called there.
Diplomatic standoff: Trudeau ran a coalition government, and was struggling to keep his majority intact, particularly in its second term. He jumped the gun, and quickly blamed India. His government freely leaked stuff to Canadian newspapers, particularly Global Mail, saying that Indian officials at the highest level—one even named Home Minister Amit Shah— and other key people in the Indian security establishment were involved.
The Trudeau government also said that they wanted to question the Indian High Commissioner, among others. They expelled the person who they said was in charge of intelligence. When India rejected that demand, they declared the Indian High Commissioner and some others persona non-grata.
They were expelled from Canada. India’s response was more than tit for tat, expelling a lot more from the Canadian missions in India. Consulates were shut down simply because Canadians had a lot more diplomats and a lot more staff in India. With that the Canadian visa process also froze.
This also exposed a big racket in human trafficking: fake visas, fake claims of education in Canada, fake claims of work in Canada. That is apparently when these countries got together and began investigating this.
Twist of faith: The key point that came out was that the Nijjar assassination was sanctioned, as they say in Americanese, by the Lawrence Bishnoi gang. His people also claimed responsibility later.
At that point they may have pretended to be doing it as “Indian patriots”. Because when you read this indictment, particularly referring to Lawrence Bishnoi, it says that he projected himself as patriot, a nationalist, a man of religion.
Remember, he’s been threatening Salman Khan all this while. Why? Because he says Salman Khan killed a blackbuck, an antelope considered holy by the Bishnoi community. That is how he’s given himself a Hindu religious colour.
The fact, however, is that these gangs are as secular as secular can be. They have Hindus and Sikhs working together and they kill Hindus and Sikhs without discrimination.
Lawrence Bishnoi, as the name indicates, is from the Bishnoi caste, a small caste in Haryana. The late chief minister of the state Bhajan Lal was a Bishnoi. Satinderjeet Singh or Goldy Brar is a Jat Sikh from Punjab. Rohit Godara is a Jat, could be from Haryana, but the indictment says Rajasthan. Of the people they have killed, Nijjar is a Jat Sikh. One Sunil Yadav was killed in Stockton, California.
So it’s not like Sikhs were killing Hindus or Hindus were killing Sikhs. It’s basically gangsters with great transnational networks killing either for extortion or kidnapping or revenge or just in paid hits, and to enable their drug and human smuggling operations.
This indictment makes it clear that the Nijjar killing was an organised hit, carried out on the orders, on a payment by the Lawrence Bishnoi gang. It does not say anywhere that any Indian government authority or official was involved. In fact, the Canadian police has also said that they have no evidence for that.
This should be a moment of reflection for Canadian authorities as well because they ruined their relationship with the fourth largest economy just because of rumours and pressures from their constituents and vote-bank, a black mark on Trudeau’s record. Since Mark Carney took over, he’s normalised relations with India, and high commissioners are back in both countries.
We are improving our trade and other important things are happening between Canada and India. The relationship is back to where it should have been had all this drama not happened but about 60-70 per cent of repair work has been done.
The Bishnoi web: The Lawrence Bishnoi gang, what the American criminal system describes as an organized crime group, had thousands of followers and gang members organised in cutout fashion, so that the head of one cutout did not know what the other was doing. They knew very little about each other. Investigators have found out that they would get sometimes minors or really impoverished people, pay them very little but promise them visas to go to Canada, Britain, Australia on the pretext of being students, etc. and carry out their tasks there.
In the process, everybody made money. The amount of cocaine smuggling which these three gangs have been held responsible for is a thousand kilos. A thousand kilos in street value right now in New York would be upwards of half a billion dollars.
And there’s much more. In these indictments are pictures of many trucks where consignments of cocaine have been caught. Then there is heroin, guns and enormous amounts of money made in illegal human trafficking. In fact, in many cases, and this applies to all three, they are also accused of stealing narcotics from other people’s consignments, waylaying them and grabbing them.
In the Dhanda case, the indictment also says that they had corrupted the Indian law enforcement machinery which means they have been bribing Indian police, immigration, etc. They also say that they also had Canadian border security agency people in their pockets. In one case there is the instance of a Canadian border security agent being controlled by the Dhanda group and he would let them know when inspections were expected so they could let their own stuff into Canada, that is narcotics and mostly cocaine from the US.
Now how do you spread fear? Killing Nijjar was one way. Nijjar was killed by two co-conspirators who were shown his picture and given his addresses by Lawrence Bishnoi. That’s what the indictment says. These alleged gunmen were subsequently arrested by the Canadians and are in jail, awaiting trial.
On 25 November the same year, that is 2023, they were shooting outside the house of well-known Punjabi singer and actor G.P. Grewal. His formal name is Rupinder Singh Grewal, and once again, a Punjabi warning was given to him on Facebook saying no one can save you from us. Pay up. This then continued in California too.
Western disturbance: The same pattern, a threat usually in Punjabi on Facebook. Little did they know that crime in India is one thing but completely different in the West. In those countries, law enforcement doesn’t necessarily work with the stick (danda). They work with electronics; the long arm of the law put mics in the phones of all these people.
So while they were using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or encrypted apps, it was being picked up by the investigating agencies. It was shared, and added up to these indictments. For example one particular extortion bid in California was fully staged by law enforcement which in this case must be the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
So they got somebody, that is Confidential Informant 1 (CI1) , who let it be known to these gangsters that he was owed a load of money by somebody, and if they could help him get it back. That request was made to Kang; his people said they would help, for a fee. CI1 then gave them the name and whereabouts of the person, also an undercover agent. He’s listed in the indictment as UC1 or undercover 1. So all of this stuff is going on, and Kang’s men don’t know that both are intelligence plants and everything that they do is being recorded.
And all of this, Kang was doing for a fee of $16,000 because after all you have to pay your people, who are all over America and Canada. This gang also tried to extort $5 million in California, from somebody called SS, obviously a Sikh and the owner of a trucking company.
In all this, one case stands out: the Jaggu Bhagwanpuria indictment. It is also significant for India. His co-conspirator Gurlal Singh is just 22, and “talented for a gangster”. He tried to make money from a rich family in Los Angeles by threatening them to get their relatives in India involved in a murder case. This was a significant case; this year on 15 January in Tanda police station area of Punjab’s Hoshiarpur district, an Aam Aadmi Party worker called Balbinder Singh was killed.
He was running a hardware shop, and Gurlal Singh and others claimed that they had carried out the hit. That is all part of building fame. After that, they called somebody in Los Angeles and said, listen you pay us $4 lakh dollars or we will have the cop, in this case the Tanda Station House Officer, embroil your family in this murder. This SHO has been removed from his position just this Wednesday as these indictments came out; he has not been charged with anything yet.
He held a press conference after this murder on 24 May, just after Gurlal Singh made his threat call. All of this was being recorded by law enforcement. The SHO says at the press conference that three more persons will be formally named very soon in this murder, and then he reaches out to them and tells them they had better pay up. All this is evidenced.
The Dhanda gang doesn’t find as much mention as the other two because what they have done does not have much connection with India except that their gang members are all apparently Indian.
However, theirs is the gang supposed to have bought over or rented, and I quote now from the indictment, an individual working for the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), and that is how they moved stuff from the US to Canada. Gang members would take a truck to the border and gang members from the Canadian side would come and take custody of the truck or the consignment, using the serial number of a dollar bill as code.
Shadow on India: Links for all three indictments are in description of this video. In conclusion, it can be said that this is a story of globally organised crime, human trafficking, drug-running at an industrial scale, gun-running, assassinations, extortions, blackmail, and all of this involving people of Indian origin.
Barring odd ones, these are ethnically Indian gangs operating overseas, also in the Anglosphere—US, Canada, Britain, Australia, parts of Europe—and targeting people of Indian origin. To that extent this is also a very sad Indian story.
It’s also a slur on India that our law enforcement has been so weak that these people have been running these rackets from India, and in the case of Bishnoi and Bhagwanpuria, from maximum security prisons. The indictment says that they have been getting these encrypted VoIP phones in prisons and running their empires quite freely. That doesn’t look good for India.
However, now that it’s formally been made clear that the Government of India or its agents or agencies were not involved in the Nijjar assassination, it is a big relief and vindication for India as well.
Just think about it. These guys who claim to be so smart they can run these multinational networks, triads, kill anybody they want, blackmail, collect humongous amounts of money, move hundreds of kilos of cocaine across borders got caught in an undercover operation by US law enforcement agencies. This tells you that however cruel and cynical these people might be, real life is not what Punjabi gangsta pop portrays it to be. What is smart in India can be dumb overseas, particularly in the developed world, or it can be too clever by half.
Also Read: US indicts gangsters Bishnoi, Brar in Nijjar killing; rules out ‘role of Indian govt officials’