Lawrence Bishnoi’s aggregator underworld: Plug, play, prey
- Raj Shekhar Jha
- TNNUpdated: Mar 02, 2026, 12:57 IST IST
In the Indian consciousness, the term ‘gangster’ is synonymous with the ‘underworld’ of 80s and 90s Mumbai, conjured through many Bollywood iterations of shadowy figures meeting in dingy docks, scrapyards and smoke-filled bars. This collective beast had a central face — the gangster-terrorist Dawood Ibrahim.
Nearly 30 years after that version of the ‘underworld’ was taken down, organised crime seems to have taken shape at a scale that is rewinding to the 90s. This one, though, is an entirely different beast, run — like many modern businesses that operate at scale — in aggregator mode, where the most lethal gang isn’t a defined group of 10, 20 or 50 but an amorphous collective of freelancers who do a job and collect their commission.
Nearly 30 years after that version of the ‘underworld’ was taken down, organised crime seems to have taken shape at a scale that is rewinding to the 90s. This one, though, is an entirely different beast, run — like many modern businesses that operate at scale — in aggregator mode, where the most lethal gang isn’t a defined group of 10, 20 or 50 but an amorphous collective of freelancers who do a job and collect their commission.
