Thefrightful gun culture and violent gang fights in Punjab have come to the fore once again with the murder of rapper Sidhu Moose Wala in broad daylight. Punjab is estimated to have some 70 gangs which are involved in kidnapping, murders, robbery among other crimes. Despite numerous arrests and police encounters in recent years, the state has struggled to rein in such gangs. These are some of the most dreaded gangsters of Punjab.
Bishnoi was born on February 12, 1993, in Dhattaranwali village in Punjab's Ferozpur district. His father was a constable with the Haryana Police. When Bishnoi was five years old, his father gave up the job and took to farming. Bishnoi got his graduation with an LLB from Panjab University. In 2009, Bishnoi joined the student organisation of Punjab University and met the then-president of the student body: Goldy Brar.
Soon after his early college years, Bishnoi started getting involved in illegal activities and the early cases against him were lodged in Chandigarh. The first FIR against Bishnoi was of an attempt to murder, followed by another of house-trespassing in April 2010. In February 2011, a case of assault and robbery was registered.
Bishnoi had made national headlines in 2018 when one of his associates, Sampat Nehra, was arrested for planning to kill Bollywood superstar Salman Khan. Nehra claimed that Bishnoi had instructed him to carry out the act. Bishnoi belongs to the community that believes blackbucks to be sacred, and Khan had been convicted in a blackbuck poaching case in 1998. At the time of this incident, Bishnoi was lodged in Rajasthan's Bharatpur jail and allegedly ran his activities using cell phones from inside the prison.
The current gang Bishnoi is a part of includes professional shooters and operates from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh, with their network spread across the globe. The gang extorts money from the liquor mafia, Punjabi singers, and other influential people.
Brar has claimed responsibility for Moosewala's murder in a Facebook post. In it Brar says, "I, along with Sachin Bishnoi Dhattaranwali, Lawrence Bishnoi group, take responsibility for the killing of Sidhu Moose Wala. His name came up in connection with the murder of Vicky Middukhera and Gurlal Brar and despite this, the police did nothing."
Lahoriya had a friend Sukha Kahlwan, who was also a gangster. Since Lovely Baba and Vicky Gounder were thick with Lahoriya, they too befriended Kahlwan. But, eventually, there was a clash of ego and Kahlwan killed Baba.
Punjab gangster Dilpreet Singh Dhahan was born in Dhahan village near Nurpur Bedi in Punjab's Ropar. Dhahan now figures among 17 A-category gangsters marked by the Punjab Police. Dhahan gained notoriety after taking responsibility for shooting and injuring Punjabi singer Parmish Verma in Mohali in April 2018.
Verma wasn't the only singer on his radar: Dhahan had also made an extortion call of Rs 10 lakh to popular singer-actor Gippy Grewal. Earlier in 2017, Dhahan was caught on camera shooting at a Hoshiarpur sarpanch outside a gurdwara in Chandigarh.
Dhahan was named in almost 30 criminal cases, including three murders and nine attempts to murder cases, in Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana and Maharashtra. Dhahan was arrested in a police encounter in July 2018 and is presently lodged in Ropar Central Jail.
Born in 1987, Kahlon was from Kapurthala in Punjab. He was often caught in violent activities in school. He eventually gave up education and picked up the gun. His father Sudarshan Singh, who was a taxi driver, and mother Harjinder Kaur migrated to the US but could not take their two sons. Then 17-year-old Sukha was involved in a fight, which had led to a police case. The crime record meant the cancellation of his passport application. His elder brother was over 18-years old and couldn't go as a dependent.
At the age of 21, Sukha got married and went to Australia with his wife. However, since he was unemployed, he did not enjoy the stay and returned to India. After returning to India, he made accomplices in the world of crime.
Kahlon went on to become a celebrated gangster with thousands of social media followers. He would often put up pictures of him beating others on his Facebook page. In his heydays, many criminals joined him making the Sukha Kahlon gang one of the most feared in Punjab. Sukha had multiple Facebook accounts which were regularly updated with violent comments and photos glorifying gun culture.
But when he was out of prison he came very close to death. While on the run in 2012, he met a gangster named Yamin from Uttar Pradesh. The two apparently joined forces to rob a jewellery shop. But after the robbery, Yamin decided to kill Sukha and take his share too. Sukha's throat is believed to have been slit and he was thrown into the Yamuna River. But despite the attempt to kill him, Sukha survived and managed to reach a hospital. A few months later, on 6 November 2012, he was arrested from Howrah in West Bengal where he was still undergoing treatment.
The death of Sidhu Moose Wala is increasingly getting linked to a turf war between the Lawrence Bishnoi gang and the Davinder Bambhia gang. Even though the notorious gangster Bambhia was killed in an encounter in 2016, his gang has continued operations with gangster Gaurav Lucky Patial at the helm. Patiyal is believed to be running the organisation from Armenia. The Bambhia gang had claimed responsibility for the killing of Youth Akali Dal leader Vicky Middukhera, who used to work for the Lawrence Bishnoi group. One theory that's floating is that Moose Wala's murder was revenge for Middukhera's killing. It is suspected Moose Wala had given protection to those who killed Middukhera. A social media post purportedly by the Davinder Bambhia gang saying Bishnoi and Brar shouldn't have killed Moose Wala has widely been shared online.
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Michael Mann's misfired gangster movie Public Enemies has a kind of Canadian counterpart with this biopic of Edwin Boyd, a bank robber who lived up to the national identity by being polite, if not apologetic.
Writer-director Nathan Morlando fashions a movie that achieves the same realistic dynamic of gangster life as Public Enemies did, but on a small fraction of the budget. Much time is spent watching the gang enjoy some hard partying among women of sometimes questionable character. And, like Dillinger, when Boyd staged a robbery, he turned it into a kind of performance art, a practice that inevitably endeared him to a small segment of society that chose to interpret his thieving as the work of a glamourous outlaw.
Winner of the prize for Best Canadian First Feature Film at TIFF, Nathan Morlando is establishing his skills early with Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster. But whoever came up with this clumsy and criminally silly title should be doing time.
GTA Online is a shambles. And that's not always a criticism. The disorder is part of what makes it so entertaining; you've played better driving games and better shooters, but everything in Los Santos is so gloriously chaotic and unpredictable that it's no surprise many people are persevering with it - despite myriad issues that would bulldoze just about any other online game. When it works, it's often a joy.
The problem is that most of the time, it doesn't work. I'm not sure I've spent any 48-hour period of my life tutting and sighing as often as I did during my first two days with the PS3 version. Half the time I was completely unable to get in. The other half saw the game hang while loading the tutorial mission or kick me out as my character approached the car you're supposed to complete it in. When I finally connected, I was forced to repeat the tutorial missions three times and had to sit through the intro seven times. I've lost six characters to date, tens of thousands of dollars of in-game cash, and it's corrupted my single-player save twice (an issue that, thankfully, seems to have been resolved).
I can deal with the connection problems. Those are to be expected in the early online days of a game that is already one of the biggest sellers of all time. The lost progress? Not so much. There's been a weird reluctance in some quarters to take Rockstar to task over this, the problems written off as 'hitches' and 'niggles'. But I've spoken to people who've ploughed dozens of hours into the game and have lost their progress entirely. Level 40 characters: gone. $150,000 savings: vanished. No one should be losing hours of effort like this, but sadly it's to be expected when a developer launches an online game of this scale and scope without extensive beta testing.
As it happens, my current character seems to be unaffected - though he's still a bit of a wax-faced monstrosity, like most of GTAO's avatars. The character creator is a good idea on paper. Your appearance is determined by a variety of factors, from your lineage to how you spend your day. Someone who spends seven hours a day watching TV, for example, will look rather different from a gym nut and part-time criminal mastermind. Yet whichever sliders you adjust, the result only looks vaguely human. A generous assessment would pin this as another example of Rockstar satire, ensuring every inhabitant of Los Santos looks like they've recently undergone cosmetic surgery.
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