Tiger Shroff Firing Brings Bollywood's Gangster Past Back Into Focus
Mumbai: On the evening of October 18, Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff drove out of a football ground in Juhu, the leafy, affluent Mumbai neighbourhood where film stars live and celebrity sightings are an everyday occurrence. The 36-year-old actor had just finished playing a game of football. As his BMW rolled towards the exit, gunshots rang out.
Shroff, whose films routinely feature elaborate action sequences and choreographed escapes, had just survived a genuine shooting attempt. He escaped the attack without bullet injuries, but his driver was wounded in the firing, and so was a vlogger who had arrived at the spot to film the actor. A wave of panic swept through the crowded locality as the gunmen fled the scene on a motorcycle.
The attack instantly dominated headlines across India and has stayed there ever since. Within days, Mumbai Police had detained or arrested ten suspects, tracing alleged weapon deliveries across several states and examining payments said to have been made to the attackers. The motorcycle used by the shooters was later found abandoned in suburban Andheri.
The investigation took a significant turn on October 22, when the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police told a court that a gangster named Anil Pandit, who had claimed responsibility for the firing in a social media post, was to be treated as a wanted accused in the case. Pandit is described by police as a 32-year-old member of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, operating from the United States.
The same day, the Esplanade Magistrate's Court in Mumbai remanded four freshly arrested accused — Kunal, 21, and Sumit, 19, both from Haryana's Sonipat district, and Radha, 23, and Babita, 23, both from Uttar Pradesh — in police custody till October 26. Producing the four before the magistrate, investigators said they had actively participated in the conspiracy with three persons arrested earlier from Kota.
Kunal and Sumit, the police said, had collected a pistol and twenty rounds of ammunition from Amritsar on Anil Pandit's instructions, while Radha and Babita travelled to Mumbai and handed the weapon over to other conspirators. Defence lawyers Ajinkya Mirgul and Satyavrat Joshi opposed the custody demand, arguing there was no material against the four and that they had been arrested on mere suspicion. The court nevertheless granted police custody.
The police have registered a case of attempt to murder in connection with the shooting.
But the name that has truly jolted the country is Lawrence Bishnoi, one of India's most notorious gangsters. Soon after the attack, a screenshot of a social media post purportedly made by an alleged associate of the Bishnoi gang began circulating online, claiming responsibility for the shooting.
A separate audio recording then emerged in which a man identifying himself as Anil Pandit repeated the claim and said Shroff had been targeted because of his alleged links to actor Salman Khan, who has faced threats from the Bishnoi gang for years.
The Mumbai Police, however, have not verified either claim and have not established that the Bishnoi gang was behind the attempted shooting. Investigators say they are still trying to determine who ordered the attack and why.
The allegation that Shroff was "on the hit list" of the gang for "not heeding our directions" and for "working with Salman Khan" rests entirely on the purported social media post and the unverified audio recording — claims the police have pointedly declined to endorse.
What makes the incident so unsettling for Mumbai's film industry is that it is not isolated. Shroff's shooting follows a series of threats and attacks involving prominent Bollywood figures: gunmen fired outside Salman Khan's home in 2024, and filmmaker Rohit Shetty's house was targeted earlier this year.
Together, these incidents have revived memories of a far darker era — the 1990s and early 2000s, when Mumbai's underworld exerted formidable influence over the film industry, financing productions, demanding protection money and sometimes using violence to enforce its demands.
It took years of police operations and the gradual arrival of institutional financing to loosen that grip. Bollywood's transformation since then has been dramatic: new financing models, corporate studios, global distribution and digital platforms have professionalised an industry that was once deeply vulnerable to coercion. Extortion calls, once an open secret of the film trade, faded from the headlines.
The Shroff attack has therefore landed with particular force. The parallels are hard to miss. On August 12, 1997, music mogul Gulshan Kumar, the founder of T-Series, was shot dead outside a temple in Juhu itself — the same neighbourhood where shots were fired at Shroff.
Three assailants fired sixteen rounds at Kumar, whose rise from running a small cassette shop to building one of India's biggest music companies had made him a powerful figure in the film business. His murder became one of the defining episodes of the underworld's violent intrusion into Bollywood.
Nearly three decades later, the scene is eerily familiar: a celebrity attacked in Juhu, gunmen on the run, and a gangster's name on everyone's lips. Police said seven rounds were fired at Shroff's car. The industry's fear is not just about one actor's safety, but about what the pattern might signify — whether criminal networks are once again probing the film industry's defences, seeking money, influence or leverage over its most prominent personalities.
The Deccan Herald noted that the two incidents belong to different phases of Bollywood's uneasy relationship with organised crime: the perpetrators, networks and methods have changed. Today's alleged threats arrive through social media posts and voice notes attributed to gangsters living abroad, not through the old underworld's couriers and tapori intermediaries.
Yet the industry, for all its new money and corporate polish, still faces threats from criminal groups seeking money, influence or leverage over its prominent personalities.
That vulnerability is precisely what has made the Shroff case such a national story. Four days after the shooting, each new revelation — the arrests in Kota, the weapons trail from Amritsar, the custody remands, the competing claims of responsibility — has spawned fresh theories and a growing list of alleged conspiracies. Television channels have debated whether the underworld is attempting to re-enter Bollywood through a new generation of gangsters operating across borders.
For the Mumbai Police, the immediate task is narrower and more urgent: establishing the chain of command behind the October 18 firing. The investigators are following the weapons and the money — the pistol collected in Amritsar, the payments under examination, the instructions attributed to Anil Pandit. Until those links are proven, the most consequential question of the case — who ordered the attack on Tiger Shroff and why — remains unanswered.
But beyond the courtroom, a larger question now hangs over the film industry. After decades of believing that the era of gangster extortion was over, Bollywood must confront the possibility that its darkest past is not entirely past. As one observer put it, the question that once seemed to belong to Mumbai's history has returned: is the underworld trying to control Bollywood again?
(Reporting based on BBC, PTI and Deccan Herald.)