Category World News

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.”

Israeli air attacks on homes and a health centre have killed at least 10 people in Qana, a Lebanese town that suffered Israeli massacres in 1996 and 2006.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas was in his element when, on stage at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) last month, he thanked 124 countries for voting yes on the first-ever resolution introduced by Palestine at the UNGA.

He was back at the scene of one of the PA’s most significant political achievements since its establishment under the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s – Palestine’s successful 2012 bid for non-member observer status.

Abbas, an architect of the peace process that created the PA as a government-in-waiting until the establishment of a Palestinian state, succeeded Yasser Arafat at the helm of the PA after his death. Since then, the PA has made international recognition and diplomacy a priority, with constant calls for UN action and a years-long campaign for the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes committed in Palestine.

At the UNGA, Abbas condemned Israel’s yearlong war on Gaza, ongoing incursions and settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

But for many Palestinians, who are reeling from the deadliest year in a long history of violence, Abbas’s words at the UN felt tired and irrelevant.

While the Palestinian Authority “paid lip service” to the tragedy Palestinians were facing, it also continued to carry out its role as “subcontractor” for the Israeli occupation by suppressing protests and resistance in the West Bank, Yara Hawari, a co-director of the Palestinian think tank Al Shabaka, told Al Jazeera.

“Really since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority has been absent from the scene, making a few comments here or there, or statements that really do nothing”, she said. “But there have been no concrete actions to support Palestinians in Gaza”.

Sam Bahour, a Palestinian American businessman based in the West Bank, agreed, telling Al Jazeera that most Palestinians feel the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian political leadership more broadly, have been largely “missing in action”.

“October 7 did not change the Palestinian leadership’s mode of operation; it merely intensified it”, he added. “Their mode was, and remains to be absent – absent on the ground in Palestine, absent politically, and absent from Palestinian daily life”.

“Where they are present is in the halls of the international venues, which has a constructive role, but one, as the past year taught everyone, that is not enough to end this Israeli-made nightmare of decades”.

Faded into the background

For years before October 7, the Palestinian Authority has seen its legitimacy tumble among Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza as it failed to protect them from escalating military and settler violence.

The Palestinian Authority security forces’ role in the suppression of Palestinian resistance and the authority’s “security coordination” with Israel – a deeply controversial, US-managed arrangement that sees PA security forces work together with Israel – have also long been a factor in Palestinians’ anger.

Disillusionment has only deepened in recent years as the PA has carried out a series of violent crackdowns and detentions, targeting not only those seen as threats to Israel’s security but also critics of the PA itself. In some cases, detainees have been subjected to abuse

Some 89 percent of Palestinians want the 88-year-old Abbas to resign, according to a poll published in June by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. The PA itself is not faring much better, with some 62 percent of Palestinians supporting its dissolution.

It doesn’t help the PA’s legitimacy that there have been no major elections in nearly two decades – meaning that an entire generation of Palestinians have never voted. Abbas called off a presidential election scheduled for 2021 after Israel rejected the inclusion of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem in the vote.

While the PA has long been perceived to be remote and out of touch, Palestinians’ frustration with their leadership has only intensified, especially in the past year.

“We are seeing an unprecedented moment of crisis in the history of the Palestinian struggle, and we are not seeing a commensurate response from the Palestinian Authority; they’ve largely just disappeared into the background”, Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program and senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington DC, told Al Jazeera.

“That contrast between the degree of urgency and need for leadership and the disappearance of that leadership at the same time has never been so stark”.

Shut out from negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza, the PA has consistently denounced the ongoing onslaught there but has proven unable to play a role toward its end. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, the deadliest Israeli raids on occupied West Bank cities in 20 years have underscored the PA’s impotence even in the areas it supposedly controls.

At least 752 people have been killed in the occupied West Bank since October 7.

“They are supposed to provide some degree of protection for Palestinians, but Palestinians in the West Bank have never been more vulnerable, more under threat, and more directly attacked by Israeli soldiers and Israeli settlers than they have been over the last several years, and especially since last October”, said Munayyer.

No political programme

Internally, Palestinian leadership has been divided on the response to Israel’s war on Gaza and escalation in the West Bank, with some criticising Abbas’s response as too timid and others debating whether the authority should play a greater role in resisting Israel.

Fatah, the party at the helm of the PA, along with Hamas and a dozen other Palestinian political factions, have resurfaced long-standing efforts to unite, signing an agreement in July in China, laying the groundwork for an “interim national reconciliation government” to rule a post-war Gaza, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. 

But the agreement was one of two dozen failed attempts to reconcile Hamas and Fatah.

Hamas won the last legislative elections in 2006, largely due to Palestinians’ frustrations with Fatah. However, Israel and the US flatly rejected the election results. In 2007, after several failed attempts to form a unity government, a US-backed coup – carried out in conjunction with Fatah – unseated Hamas.

In the conflict that followed, Hamas seized control of Gaza, effectively splitting Palestinian political leadership between Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Since then, several declarations of unity between Fatah and Hamas have led nowhere, and it is unclear whether this time will be any different. Israel has firmly rejected any arrangement in which Hamas plays a role in governance.

But the replacement of Hamas in Gaza by the PA – a prospect suggested by US officials as a possible “day after” scenario following the war – has been rejected by many even within the PA.

When the idea was first raised, shortly after the war started, then-PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said that PA officials would not be going to Gaza “on an Israeli military tank”.

In February, Shtayyeh and his government resigned amid intense pressure from the US to “reform” the Authority.

His successor, Mohammad Mustafa, “has been really just focusing on making sure that the Palestinian Authority just stays afloat and stays alive”, Diana Buttu, a Palestinian analyst and former legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, told Al Jazeera.

“The PA is at a place now where they see that their existence is on the line.”

So far, the PA’s response seems to have been to hunker down and wait out the crisis.

“So it’s no longer Shtayyeh coming in on the back of the tank, which is what the fear was, but in this odd way, it’s Abu Mazen coming in on the back of the tank because he has said and done nothing over the course of the past year, other than just to ride this out,” said Buttu, referring to Abbas by his nickname.

“When your political programme is just to ride out every massacre and ride out genocide, it means you have no political programme.”

Destroying the Palestinian Authority

Defenders of Palestinian leadership argue that the PA operates under enormous constraints.

In addition to its role as civic administrator and provider of basic services for some three million Palestinians living in the West Bank, the donor-funded Authority is also the largest employer in Palestine, paying the salaries of an estimated 150,000 public employees, including in Gaza, where it has no control.

But Israel controls cash flow to the PA, frequently withholding funds to apply pressure. After October 7, Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich began to withhold some $80m a month – the equivalent of the funds the PA was transferring to Gaza, arguing they would end up in Hamas’ hands.

That forced the PA to cut the salaries of thousands of people, deepening an ongoing economic crisis. The situation was already dire due to an Israeli ban on the tens of thousands of Palestinian labourers who travelled to Israel for work before October 7.

Jamal Nazzal, a spokesperson for Fatah, described Israel’s policies towards the PA as “crippling”.

He added that far-right members of the Israeli government have gone to great lengths to discredit the PA, accusing it of supporting the October 7 attacks. Smotrich has often been at the forefront of that crusade, at one point calling for the PA to be “dismantled”.

“The Israeli government is waiting for the pretext to destroy the Palestinian Authority,” said Nazzal. “I don’t think they see it as part of the future. They want to get rid of it because they do not want any form of political representative for the Palestinian people”.

Many Palestinians, however, hardly feel represented by the PA. With the war still raging in Gaza, there is little space to envision a political future but those that do, question whether the PA should play a role in it at all.

“The Palestinian Authority is not a representative body… It doesn’t have a mandate from the people, it doesn’t govern as a result of elections”, said Hawari, of Al Shabaka. “Its shelf life is coming to a very near end”.

What will come after is a question on most Palestinians’ minds, even as many are too exhausted by the last year to grapple with it fully.

“The Palestinian people are not at this moment in a condition where they are focused on anything other than the horror that continues to rain down on them from all directions”, said Munayyer, from the Arab Center.

“And we are not seeing a response from PA leadership. It’s more or less business as usual, the same old statements, the same old meetings with officials, UN resolutions, this kind of stuff.

Billionaire Elon Musk has funnelled about $75m over three months into an organisation he created in support of former United States President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate.

The spending, revealed in a federal disclosure on Tuesday, underscores how Musk has become a key piece of Trump’s efforts to win the November 5 presidential election against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

It also underscores the persistent influence of mega-donors in US politics.

Speaker to right-wing personality Tucker Carlson earlier this month, Musk said he had created the group, known as a political action committee or PAC, to “support the core values that I believe in”.

Named the America PAC, the group describes those values as the pursuit of secure borders, sensible spending, safe cities, a fair justice system, free speech and self-protection.

Musk — who owns the car company Tesla, the social media platform X and the aerospace company SpaceX — is considered one of the wealthiest men in the world.

The South Africa-born entrepreneur endorsed Trump following an assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Musk later joined Trump on the campaign trail when Trump returned to Butler for another rally in October.

“As you can see, I am not just MAGA. I am dark MAGA,” Musk said at the time, gesturing to his black “Make America Great Again” hat.

Speaking at the Butler rally, Musk said Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively”.

Trump has regularly referenced Musk’s endorsement on the campaign trail. He also pledged to tap Musk to lead a newly envisioned government efficiency commission if he regains the White House in November.

All told, America PAC had spent $87m on the race as of October 9, largely investing in voter mobilisation and canvassing efforts in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.

As a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, corporations have been able to spend an unlimited amount on political activities in support of candidates, as long as they do not directly coordinate with a campaign.

Previously, corporations were limited as to how much they could spend to help a candidate win. But the Citizens United decision paved the way for the creation of super PACS, which — unlike traditional PACs — have no cap on fundraising.

Spending in US elections has since surged. The ruling also saw an increase in so-called “dark money”, with individual able to hide their election spending through shell companies that donate to super PACs.

OpenSecrets, a politics watchdog, projects that a record total of $15.9bn will be spent on federal elections during the 2024 season.

That will exceed the $15.1bn spent during the 2020 election cycle — though, when adjusted for inflation, the value of that dollar amount is roughly worth $18.3bn in today’s currency.

OpenSecrets also reported that outside spending on campaigns — including through Musk’s America PAC — is well outpacing previous election cycles.

Outside groups have spent nearly $2.6bn so far this year, and there is still a month until the election. That’s nearly a billion more than at the same point in 2020.