Organised crime in India
organised crime networks of India
There is no firm data to indicate the number of organised criminal gangs operating in India, their membership, their modus operandi, and the areas of their operations. Their structure and leadership patterns may not strictly fall in line with the classical Sicilian Mafia.
Indian organized crime is also prevalent outside of India, mainly in western countries such as Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. In Canada Indian organized crime groups have been involved in extortion, targeted violence and terrorism. The ongoing diplomatic row between Canada and India is in relation to this. Unrelated to the established crime groups in India, are there also crime groups of Indian-origin engaging in criminal activities such as drugtrafficking, extortion, smuggling and money laundering in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Mumbai underworld
Mumbai is the financial capital of India. Over a period of time, the Mumbai underworld has been dominated by several different groups and mobsters.
1940s–1980s
The powerful trio of Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar, and Karim Lala enjoyed backing from their communities.
Haji Mastan, originally known as Mastan Haider Mirza, was a Bombay-based Tamil mobster who became the first celebrity gangster in the city of Bombay (now Mumbai).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Organised crime in India” as organised crime networks of India. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16056525. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Organised crime in India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.