New Delhi, India — India-Canada bilateral relations touched a historic low this week when both countries expelled six diplomats each, in tit-for-tat moves, after Ottawa doubled down on its accusation that the Indian government masterminded the 2023 murder of a prominent Sikh separatist leader.

While levelling serious conspiracy charges against India’s senior-most diplomats in Ottawa, the Canadian officials dropped another bombshell allegation — linking the diplomatic mission with India’s most notorious crime syndicate boss, Lawrence Bishnoi.

Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has been investigating the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, blamed the “Bishnoi group” for carrying out hit jobs at the behest of the Indian government’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Bishnoi is currently imprisoned in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat — in the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad — ruled by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

So, who is Lawrence Bishnoi? How does he continue to run his crime syndicate from behind bars? And how does a gangster fit into a serious geopolitical crisis between two democracies with deep historical ties?

From a Punjab village to Mumbai

Bishnoi, 31, first captured national attention when he was linked with the killing of hip-hop icon, Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, on May 29, 2022. Moose Wala was also a member of India’s opposition party, Congress. Bishnoi’s associates claimed responsibility for the murder as part of an intergang rivalry.

More recently, Bishnoi’s gang claimed responsibility for the murder of a 66-year-old Muslim politician, Baba Siddique, in Mumbai’s posh Bandra area last weekend.

Siddique was a three-time legislator and former minister in the Maharashtra state government. He was widely known for his closeness with Bollywood celebrities, most notably with actor Salman Khan.

“We do not have any enmity with anyone but whoever helps Salman Khan … keep your accounts in order,” noted a purported Facebook post by an associate of Bishnoi, claiming responsibility for Siddique’s killing.

Bishnoi’s feud with Khan goes back nearly 26 years over the actor’s killing of two antelopes on a recreational hunting trip in Rajasthan while shooting a film in the western state in 1998. The Bishnoi religious sect considers the species sacred.

In April this year, two members of the gang were arrested for firing at Khan’s home in Mumbai.

“For gangsters, it is all in the name — and the fear of that name,” Jupinderjit Singh, author of Who Killed Moosewala?, who has traced gang wars in north India for nearly a decade, told Al Jazeera.

“Lawrence often says, ‘Bada kaam karna hai [I have to do something big]’. Earlier, the ‘big job’ was murdering Moose Wala, then attacking Salman Khan, and now Siddique,” said Singh. “These attacks add brand value to his name and multiply the extortion and ransom amount” the gang can demand.

His alleged collusion with the Indian government to assassinate Sikh separatists in Canada is eventually proven or not, Canadian officials — by naming Bishnoi’s gang — have already delivered a PR victory for them, Singh said,

“Eventually, the winner is Lawrence here. He is getting the name he has yearned for,” the author said.

“People like Lawrence live by the gun — and they die by the gun.”

The ‘I’m something’ syndrome

Born in 1993, near the Pakistan border in India’s Sikh-majority Punjab state, Lawrence Bishnoi was “exceptionally fair, nearly a pinkish complexion, and almost European rather than Indian”, according to his mother, Sunita, a graduate-turned-homemaker, as she told author Singh during their interactions for his research.

Hence, the name, Lawrence — uncommon among the Bishnoi community in north India — which was inspired by British educationist and administrator Henry Lawrence, who was stationed in Punjab during the colonial era.

Bishnoi’s family was well-off and owned more than 100 acres (40 hectares) of farming land in Punjab’s Duttaranwali village. After high school, Bishnoi went to Chandigarh, the state’s capital, to study law.

There, at DAV College, he stepped into student politics and allegedly ventured into the criminal world by locking horns with rival student groups. Bishnoi served as the president of the college’s student body. He was arrested over charges of arson and attempt to murder and sent to a jail in Chandigarh, where he reportedly came under the influence of other imprisoned gangsters.

In Punjab, it is a common phenomenon that the gangsters come from “well-off, good families”, said Singh, the author who has also tracked Bishnoi’s rise since his college days. “All of them suffer from a syndrome: ‘I’m something’,” he added.

However, when they move to cities and face “an elite, intellectual crowd, they realise they are not landlords any more”, says Singh. For many of them, crime becomes an answer to reaffirm their faith in themselves, he adds.

Among his young followers, Bishnoi is highly revered as “a man of principle”, said a senior police officer, requesting anonymity, in Rajasthan, where the Bishnoi gang has recruited members. “He positions himself as this righteous bachelor, a celibate, often signing off with remarks like “Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram)”, a Hindu right-wing war cry.

Bishnoi has been shuffling between prisons for more than a decade now but has still extended his crime syndicate to the national capital, New Delhi, and neighbouring states, and fought turf wars with rival gangs in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab. He is known to have active associates across Canada and the United States.

“With Siddique’s killing, he is aiming to place himself in Mumbai’s feared underworld now,” the police officer told Al Jazeera.

So, when Singh, the author, woke up to the news of Canada linking Bishnoi to Indian agents, he said, “I really, really wished it is untrue” because of the legitimacy within the crime world Bishnoi may get out of it — “and spill over to a section of youth that is unfortunately looking up to him now”.

How does Bishnoi fit into the India-Canada crisis?

At the heart of the latest allegations levelled by Canada against Indian officials is the claim by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made on Monday, that Indian diplomats were collecting information about Canadians and passing it on to organised crime gangs to attack Canadians.

The RCMP, separately, made clear in comments to the press that Canadian authorities were referring to the Bishnoi gang when they were speaking of organised crime.

“India has made a monumental mistake,” said Trudeau. “We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil,” he added, marking an unprecedented escalation of the diplomatic crisis that has been brewing for more than a year now, since he first publicly accused the Indian government of involvement in Nijjar’s assassination.

India has denied the allegations as “preposterous” – and has been challenging Ottawa to share evidence to back the claims.

To Michael Kugelman, director of the Washington, DC-based Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, it is “remarkable how India-Canada relations have collapsed within a year”. And “the mere fact that an allegation [of the Indian government colluding with criminal gangs] has been put in public, including its senior diplomats’ participation, does not look good on India’s global reputation.”

‘Canada is new Pakistan?’

The issue of Sikh separatism, or the so-called Khalistan movement, has been a thorn in India-Canada relations for decades.

A crackdown on the movement by Indian security agencies in the 1980s also led to serious human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings of civilian Sikhs in Punjab, according to rights groups. Many Sikh families emigrated to Canada, where the community already had a presence.

In 1985, hardliner Sikh rebels blew up an Air India plane flying from Montreal, Canada to Mumbai, India, via London and New Delhi. The midair explosion over the Atlantic Ocean killed all 329 people on board — most of them Canadian citizens.

In recent years, the Khalistan movement — while almost dead in India — has regained some momentum among a few Sikh diaspora communities, including in Canada.

In September last year, less than a day after India’s premier investigation agency named a separatist, Sukhdool Singh, on its wanted list, he was killed in a shootout in Canada’s Winnipeg city. Soon, Bishnoi’s gang claimed responsibility, calling him a “drug addict” and saying he was “punished for his sins”.

But while Canada has now accused Bishnoi of working hand-in-glove with the Indian government in carrying out assassinations on its soil, New Delhi this week “strongly” rejected the allegations and insisted that Canada had not provided any proof “despite many requests from our side”.

“This leaves little doubt that on the pretext of an investigation, there is a deliberate strategy of smearing India for political gains,” the Indian Ministry of External Affairs statement said after Canada listed top Indian diplomats, including its high commissioner, Sanjay Verma, as people of interest in the investigation.

Speaking with Al Jazeera, Ajay Bisaria, a former Indian high commissioner to Canada, said, “With big targets painted on their backs and their security compromised for a while, the diplomats were in any case unable to function.”

Calling it a “needless escalation by Trudeau’s government of an already vexed diplomatic situation”, Bisaria said “such a move is unheard of in modern diplomatic practice. This kind of scenario plays out between hostile powers, not between friendly democracies.”

Harsh Pant, vice president for studies and foreign policy at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, said Trudeau “seems to have become emblematic of the problem with a lack of trust about him and his intentions” from India’s perspective.

“India and Canada have clearly gone to new lows,” he said, adding, “Canada is now the new Pakistan for New Delhi amid the persistent issues of extremism, Sikh separatism, and radicalisation in Canada.”

Kugelman, of the Wilson Center, said, “India has started to treat Canada like it treats Pakistan at least in terms of blistering diplomatic statements and the accusations that Canada is sponsoring terrorism.”

“Arguably, India’s relations with Canada today are perhaps worse than it has with Pakistan due to the ongoing rapid-fire escalation.”