Constructing organised crime in India: media framing, criminal celebrity, and the Lawrence Bishnoi Gang

This study examines how Indian news media frame and narrativizes the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, focusing on the mediated construction of organised crime within contemporary news discourse. Although organised crime is frequently encountered through media representations, limited communication scholarship has examined how gangs are framed in Indian news media. Drawing on media framing theory and cultural criminology, this study employed reflexive thematic analysis of 718 English-language news articles published between 2010 and 2025 across six major Indian newspapers. The analysis identified five dominant media frames: narratives of criminal transformation, organisational coherence, cultural symbolism, criminal celebrity, and entrepreneurial criminality. Findings demonstrate how news discourse constructs organised crime through recurring narratives of spectacle, notoriety, moralisation, and criminal omnipotence, while simultaneously shaping public understandings of deviance, legitimacy, and social order. The study contributes to communication research on media framing and mediated representations of crime, particularly within non-Western media contexts.