Gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, alias Satinder Singh – is he linked to the great nature and wild-life lovers, the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan?
Many decades before the legendary Chipko movement in the Reni and Mandal villages of the Henwal Ghati, in the Himalayas, led by brave Gaura Devi and other women, it was the Bishnoi women and men who first sacrificed their bodies hugging their precious Khejri trees.
If you travel through the beautiful desert state of Rajasthan in Northern India, where women wear such kaleidoscopic, vibrant and pulsating dresses to beat the monotony of the white, sandy days and arid, dusty evenings, you will notice the thin Khejri trees, standing like the last soldiers in a forsaken battlefield. They give fodder to the cattle, and shade and shadow to the weary farmers and travellers in the scorching heat. They are loved and protected by the local communities.
The Bishnoi community, love animals, especially the beautiful black bucks. Their women feed milk to the little black bucks as they do to their own children.
In September, 1730, the Maharaja of Marwar, reportedly sent his soldiers to cut the Khejri trees in the village of Khejarli because he needed wood for his new palace. The story goes that one young woman with two little kids refused to allow them to cut the trees. She was alone in the village at that time, the others having gone in search for work. She hugged the trees with her children.
She and her children were cut into several pieces.
The villagers returned. They said, No!
Not one tree would be allowed to be cut!
As many as 363 people, women and kids, including newly-married couples, hugged the trees. They were all beheaded.
Lawrence Bishnoi was born on February 12, 1993 in a village in Ferozpur district, Punjab. His father was a police constable in the Haryana Police, and they had inherited a huge agricultural land. Was he from the Bishnoi community? It seems so.
That is why he is reported to be the mastermind behind the firing outside Salman Khan’s house, even while a top politician of the ruling coalition in Maharashtra, with close links to the Khans of Bollywood, has been murdered, apparently by young sharp-shooters of the Bishnoi gang.
Salman Khan has been in the cross-hair of the Bishnoi community since the time he went for a hunting spree with the black bucks as his reckless target during a film shooting in Rajasthan. He has been in jail, in and out, since then, and seems to have found a way to escape the judicial net. Against his powerful connections and deep pockets, the Bishnois have chased the case for years, and are still nursing their wounds.
If anything, it only proves, that nothing is ever forgotten or buried permanently in history. It could be the mass murder of innocent citizens, as in Gujarat 2002, Gaza/Beirut 2024, or black bucks in Rajasthan, history must and shall repeat, as both nightmare and retribution.
Lawrence Bishnoi is also in the news because none other than the prime minister of Canada has mentioned about him, linking him to the ‘top brass’ in Delhi and in the Indian embassy in Canada. Justin Trudeau has spoken categorically about how Indian agents have been trying to to silence and suppress critics of Narendra Modi’s regime, and that on Canadian soil, which is a violation of all international and diplomatic protocol.
Trudeau has mentioned about Indian “diplomats collecting information on Canadians who are opponents or in disagreement with the Modi government”. Information was then passed along to “the highest levels within the Indian government”, and then “through criminal organizations like the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, to then result in violence against Canadians on the ground.”
He said that these intimidation tactics in Canada were not limited only to the Sikh community. He had met with Modi during the G20 Summit in September, 2023, and expressed his concerns in private.
According to media reports, The Washington Post has done an exclusive investigation on the issue — exposing all and sundry. Canadian officials have reportedly informed India that “conversations and texts among Indian diplomats” ordered out of the country “include references” to Union Home Minister Amit Shah and a senior official in the Research and Analysis Wing in India (RAW)… “who have authorised… intelligence-gathering missions and attacks on Sikh separatists,” in Canada.
Clearly, Modi, his best buddy, the Union home minister, and the NSA, did not seem to move an inch. Lawrence Bishnoi is now comfortably lodged at the Sabarmati Jail in Gujarat. Critics point out that he is allegedly operating from the prison under the protective umbrella of the Gujarati power establishment in Gandhinagar and Delhi.
Meanwhile, as a top level Indian enquiry committee reached Washington DC, the FBI in the US has issued a wanted poster for a RAW official named Vikash Yadav, who is now being dubbed as an conspirator behind the plot to kill Sikh separatist leader, and an American citizen, Gutpatwant Singh Pannun.
The story is messy. An Indian, Nikhil Gupta, picked up in the Czeck republic and now lodged in an American jail, along with Vikash Yadav, apparently under the supervision of unknown master-minds in India, were planning to murder Pannun. They hired a professional assassin, promising to pay $100,000 for the job. They paid him $15,000 in advance. In a dark irony, the so-called assassin turned out to be an American undercover agent, while all the ‘secret conversations’ were being duly recorded.
Clearly, the Modi regime in India, and its top brass, is on a very, very sticky wicket. It’s so messy, that they seem to have withdrawn into a depressing silence, thereby giving grist to the rumour mills.
The opposition has upped its ante on this burning controversy, involving top Western democracies and their ‘Five Eyes’, their heads of states, foreign ministries, Intelligence and police services.
A recent meeting was reportedly held between top Canadian security and foreign ministry officials and Indian NSA, Ajit Doval, in Singapore on October 12. No one knows what was discussed.
All that is known is that the entire Canadian establishment, its police chief, foreign minister and the prime minister has come out, openly accusing top Indian officials in the embassy in Canada, in cahoots with the top brass in Delhi, of intending to intimidate and carry out violent activities against certain individuals and dissenters in Canada.
This is, indeed, unprecedented in the history of Indian foreign policy since independence.
Reports state that Canada is convinced that there is “clear and compelling evidence”… “that agents of the government of India have engaged in and continue to engage in activities that pose a significant threat to public safety, including clandestine information gathering techniques, coercive behaviour targeting South Asian Canadians, and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder…”
In any circumstances, these are extremely serious charges, with global ramifications.
In September 2023, Trudeau had declared of Indian involvement in the murder of Khalistani activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. There was “credible intelligence”, he had said. The Indian government has denied the charges.
The question now being asked in political circles is that who is protecting Lawrence Bishnoi, and why? How is he able to organise young and unemployed sharp-shooters from across the Hindi heartland, train them, and use them to threaten, extort and murder certain individuals, for reasons, not always known. For instance, the Baba Siddiqui murder still remains trapped in a zone of mystery.
Indeed, was the Bishnoi gang involved in the murder of Nijjhar in Canada? Who played them along? And what are the links of others like RAW agent Vikash Yadav, Nikhil Gupta, etc?
If the Union home ministry and the PMO/NSA were, allegedly, in the know, why did they allow such a messy situation to emerge, violating diplomatic and international protocol? And how come, smart as they think they are, they were caught/trapped so easily, with an undercover American agent taking them for a ride?
So what is the huge price India and its people will have to pay for this messy scenario?
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