If it weren’t so worrisome, it would’ve made a wholesome study.

When Canada’s most wanted criminal Goldy Brar doubled the ante on Salman Khan’s life and reiterated that the actor would be killed, he endorsed his boss Lawrence Bishnoi’s threat of 2022. Brar, who went to Canada on a student visa, and crime boss Bishnoi, who’s been shunting between different Indian jails, have proudly taken the credit for the killing of Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala in 2022. Soon after, the threat to Salman was issued.

Interestingly, there’s much in common between high-value Hindi film stars and dreaded criminals from the underworld. One is the use of the word “bhai” for the boss of the show. Once Sanjay Dutt outgrew the “Sanju Baba” tag, close associates refer to him as bhai. To this day, Karan Johar calls Shah Rukh Khan bhai and when friends and staff at Galaxy Apartments say bhai, they mean Salman. It’s not bhaijaan or bhaiya, it’s just bhai. Uttered with respect and reverence. Strangely, in the underworld too, bhai is how Goldy refers to Lawrence Bishnoi.

There is another commonality. Brar emphasised that once Bishnoi had made a statement, there was no going back, it was a writ. A “bhai ne bol diya toh” kind of swagger that straightaway replicates Hindi movie heroics. Salman himself has mouthed lines like, “Ek baar jo maine commitment kar di, uske baad mai apne aap ki bhi nahi sunta.”

There’s also been a boast that Bishnoi has bought a Rs 4 lakh gun for the Salman assignment and dry runs have been on since 2018. Now it’s only a matter of time.

But why is Salman a target?

The official reason remains the 1998 chinkara poaching case where Salman, during the shooting of Hum Saath Saath Hain in Jodhpur, allegedly killed a black buck. Since court cases wear everybody down by stretching over decades, as far as I can remember, he was convicted for it in a Rajasthan court but his appeal is pending.

Although the gangster is said to have sent a message to Salman to go to a Bishnoi temple near Bikaner and pray for forgiveness, an inside story is that it is a ruse. The threat is no longer about a tribe seeking revenge for the killing of their revered black buck, it’s more about bolstering the gangster’s extortion value. With every blockbuster, the market price of a film star zooms up. Similarly, with every highprofile killing, gangsters puff their chests out a little more and up their demands from potential victims. “Look what we did to Moosewala” works like Gabbar Singh’s “So jao nahi toh Gabbar aayega”. It’s lucrative. The dread of the gangster becomes palpably real and his status rises in the society of criminals.

A high-profile killing thus pushes up a gangster’s asking rate in the extortion racket and with every premium murder, his fan club grows. Oh yes, gangsters too have their own fan clubs. In the aftermath of the brazen killing of crime lords Atiq Ahmed and Ashraf outside a Prayagraj jail, the young gunmen told the police that they did it because they too wanted to become famous “like Lawrence Bishnoi”.

The stakes are, therefore, high and bravado rules the crime world with Bishnoi seeking the fame of Lawrence of Arabia. Gangsters are crazy, they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Decoding the criminal mind, the Mumbai Police and the Khan family have reason to take the threat seriously. Galaxy Apartments used to be an easygoing, approachable star residence until security got so beefed up that one can no longer stroll in casually.

Incidentally, an industrialist who had a bomb scare outside his fortress-like building also took Bishnoi’s threat to Salman seriously. When Salman returned from Austria after shooting for his Tiger franchise last year and landed at the private Kalina airport, it is believed that a very concerned Mukesh Ambani had sent a bullet-proof car and two of his own security men to receive the actor and stay by his side thereafter.

The bond between Salman and the Ambanis is stronger than red carpet friendships.