"In the entire film industry, whoever works without our agreement or collaborates with Salman Khan will be killed."
The warning came in an audio message sent by the alleged attackers of Indian actor Tiger Shroff in Mumbai in mid-October, claiming responsibility for the shooting. writes DW.
The alleged perpetrators claimed to be linked to Lawrence Bishnoi, a former student politician turned gangster who has been in prison since 2014. The police have not yet confirmed the involvement of his group.
The shots fired at Shroff, which injured his driver, are just the latest in a series of attacks targeting prominent figures in the Mumbai-based film industry known as Bollywood.
Since 2022, gunmen have shot at actor Salman Khan's apartment and director Rohit Shetty's home in Mumbai, as well as actress Disha Patani's family home in the north India. Actor Ranveer Singh has reportedly also received a demand to pay almost 980.000 euros.
The attacks also spread to the other side of the world. A cafe in Surrey, Canada, owned by comedian Kapil Sharma, was the target of as many as three attacks.
For an industry that once lived in the shadow of organized crime, these attacks have awakened old fears and brought to mind the crime bosses of the 1990s. But experts claim that today's threat to Bollywood looks significantly different than it did thirty years ago.
When the underworld ruled Bollywood
In the 1990s, the Mumbai underworld was deeply intertwined with the film industry in India.
"The mafia has always been fascinated by the film industry," says S. Hussain Zaidi, a crime journalist and author of "From Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia," who has tracked organized crime in the city for more than three decades.
Gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem and Chota Shakeel, he told DW, were "completely obsessed" with Bollywood, much like mobsters sought to gain a foothold in Hollywood.
Movies brought glitz and glamor to criminals, but also the possibility of money laundering. They invested in film projects "so they could control the industry and have a legal way to make money," Zaidi adds.
When producers didn't want to cooperate, the consequences could be deadly. Music mogul Gulshan Kumar, the founder of the record company T-Series, was killed in 1997. Three years later, director Rakesh Roshan, father of Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan, was injured in a shooting.
The streets of Mumbai were "red with blood" in 1998, Zaidi says, describing that year as the height of the showdown among gangster groups.
D. Sivanandan, a former Mumbai police chief who led the crackdown on the underworld, claims that in 1998 alone, 101 entrepreneurs were killed, or one "every third day", mostly because of unpaid rackets.
Police activities were further strengthened by a tough law against organized crime passed in 1999, which Sivanandan calls the "ultimate weapon". Security services used electronic surveillance and preventive detention and seized around 2.500 illegal weapons.
"There were also several police clashes with criminals, but that was neither a policy nor a strategy," he told DW.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the power of the gangs was broken and it seemed that a new Mumbai was being born.
A gang run from a prison cell
The man believed to be behind the latest wave of attacks is not from Mumbai.
Thirty-three-year-old Bishnoi comes from a landowning family from the northern state of Punjab. He was studying in Chandigarh when he was drawn to violent student politics. After his arrest, he ended up in jail and gradually turned to crime, claims journalist Jupinderjit Singh, author of the book "Gangs of Punjab".
"He enrolled in a kind of crime university in prison," Singh told DW.
Bishnoi went on to build what Singh describes as one of the first multi-state crime syndicates in northern India. Investigators say he still runs operations from prison using hidden phones and messaging apps.
He is currently in jail in Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
His network extends beyond the borders of India. Canada declared Bishnoi's group a terrorist organization in September 2025. In September, the FBI placed Satinderjit Singh, better known as Goldie Brar, on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and offered a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to his arrest. US prosecutors have described him as the alleged leader of Bishnoi's organization in North America.
Although Bishnoi comes from a wealthy landowning family, his perpetrators generally come from the poorer strata of society. The gang usually recruits them over the Internet.
"There are many youngsters who want to achieve something... they are simply drawn to the myth created around Lawrence Bishnoi," explains Singh. "Recruitment is no problem. They offer money, protection and weapons."
Lawrence Bishnoi is escorted by security forces as he leaves the court complex in Amritsar, India, on October 31, 2022
Why are movie stars the target?
For Bishnoi, the whole story seems to be personal in nature.
In 1998, Salman Khan was accused of killing a black antelope, an animal considered sacred by the Bishnoi community. Bishnoi has vowed revenge, and many attacks have targeted people close to the actor, including the 2024 killing of politician Baba Siddiqui, which police have linked to the gang.
Singh believes that it is also an attempt to gain social legitimacy. Criminals, he says, "always try to find something that portrays them as moral guardians," and it was this case that gave Bishnoi "an opportunity for redemption."
But money and intimidation also play an important role.
"Bollywood has huge amounts of money," says Singh, noting that the previous generation of gangsters is no longer in a position to take advantage of that fact.
"After the departure of Dawood Ibrahim and others like him, there was a vacuum that Lawrence Bishnoi is trying to exploit."
Sivanandan explains that Mumbai's old gangs ran a whole range of illegal businesses, from smuggling and racketeering to cricket match-fixing. Their members were "local boys", while Bishnoi's group "has nothing to do with Mumbai". Bollywood is interesting to them because it is an industry that is "swimming in money" and is a "soft target".
"They use Bollywood as an ATM," he tells DW. "Insert card and withdraw money."
Zaidi, on the other hand, believes that the attacks primarily serve publicity.
"It's a way to make headlines," he tells DW. Just hours after the latest attack on Shroff, someone claimed on social media that he was targeted because he is close to Salman Khan, which Zaidi calls "completely illogical and absurd".
Still, the publicity is useful to gangs who live off extortion.
"The basis of all extortion is creating fear," a security expert in charge of protecting several Bollywood stars, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject, told DW.
Is Bollywood under siege?
Despite everything, experts believe that it is difficult to compare the current violence with the crime wave of the 1990s.
"I wouldn't talk about a comeback, because that would be an exaggeration," says Zaidi. In the 1990s, several rival gangs fought a battle for control of Mumbai. Today, apart from Bishnoi's group, other gangs are not considered active in this city.
Also, the film industry no longer pays the racket as it used to because the shift to digital payments has made it difficult to conceal large cash transactions, he adds.
Sivanandan disagrees. Shooting at walls and front doors, followed by quick social media posts, "is aimed solely at collecting extortion money," he claims. According to him, "Cash-rich Bollywood surely pays enough to finance an entire army of people."
Be that as it may, the fear is real.
And although violence is not as widespread as it once was, hundreds of thousands of people depend on the film industry in Mumbai.
"If the fear of the underworld continues, leading names may be forced out of Mumbai," All India Film Workers Association (AICWA) president Suresh Shyamlal Gupta wrote in a letter to Home Minister Amit Shah.
"We will not allow Mumbai to return to the underworld days of the 1990s or let Bollywood operate in the shadow of fear," Gupta said.
Given that the police and prosecutors appear to be on the defensive, criminal groups are likely to continue their campaign.
Several Bollywood stars have already stepped up their security measures.
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