Credit: Based on a Facebook article originally written by Kamlesh Chaubey of Swadesh News Channel, with additional newsroom-style restructuring and verification from published reports.

Indore: Madhya Pradesh is often described as an island of relative calm, but Indore’s crime history tells a more complicated story. In the early 2000s, the city known as “Mini Mumbai” saw a violent underworld feud that began with the killing of Vishnu Ustad, one of Indore’s most feared and influential local strongmen, and spiralled into a chain of revenge killings, jail violence and courtroom drama.

Vishnu Ustad, whose real name was Vishnu Kashid, was known in local crime circles as a wrestler-turned-gang leader. The title “Ustad” came from his reputation as a pehalwan, but over time it became a marker of fear, influence and authority in Indore’s mill-area politics and underworld networks.

According to local accounts, Vishnu began as a worker in a textile mill before building a criminal network that expanded into land disputes, forced evictions, illegal recoveries and contract-related influence. At his peak, he was considered one of Indore’s most powerful underworld figures, with links that reportedly stretched from working-class settlements to union politics.

His rise also reflected the way crime, labour politics and land power often overlapped in urban India during the 1990s. Indore was expanding rapidly, property values were rising, and musclemen increasingly became informal “settlers” of disputes. In that shadow economy, men like Vishnu Ustad became both feared and sought after.

But, as often happens in gangland histories, the biggest threat came not from outsiders but from within.

Several of Vishnu Ustad’s former associates later drifted away and built their own networks. Among the names that emerged in the rivalry were Jeetu Thakur and Satish Bhau. Jeetu, according to local crime narratives, had once been close to Vishnu’s gang but later became a rival after developing his own influence.

The split allegedly turned deadly. In Chaubey’s account, Jeetu Thakur, Satish Bhau and other associates planned Vishnu Ustad’s murder to break his control over Indore’s criminal underworld and capture the space he dominated.

Vishnu Ustad was attacked near Anoop Talkies while travelling by motorcycle after attending a community meeting, according to the account. A vehicle allegedly hit his motorcycle, after which assailants attacked him with knives. He was taken first toward the police station and then toward hospital, but he died before he could be saved.

His murder marked the beginning of one of Indore’s most violent gang rivalries.

The person who would become central to the next phase of the story was Vishnu’s son, Yuvraj Ustad. According to local accounts and reports from the period, Yuvraj was determined to avenge his father’s death. What followed was a sequence of killings in which several men accused or linked in local narratives to Vishnu Ustad’s murder were later killed.

The list became part of Indore’s crime folklore: Mahendra Thakur was killed in 2003; Mahendra alias Timma was killed in 2007; Manoj Khaparde and Dilip were killed in the Kishanganj area; Narendra Singh Kushwah was killed in Palasia; Manish Shooter died in a police encounter; and Tarun Sajnani died by suicide in circumstances that continued to generate speculation in local circles.

The most dramatic killing, however, was that of Jeetu Thakur inside Mahu sub-jail.

Jeetu Thakur, who was accused in the Vishnu Ustad murder case, was lodged in Mahu sub-jail when armed men entered the prison during visiting hours and opened fire. Reports say he was shot in the head, while others, including jail personnel and visitors, were injured. The attack shocked Indore not only because of the killing but because it happened inside a jail — a place where the state, at least on paper, is supposed to have full control.

The prosecution later alleged that the killing was part of a revenge conspiracy. Yuvraj Ustad was named as an accused, but the case took a major turn in court years later.

After a trial that lasted about 15 years, an Indore court acquitted Yuvraj Ustad and others due to lack of evidence. His defence argued that he was lodged in a jail in Maharashtra at the time of the incident. The court accepted the argument and held that the prosecution had failed to prove the conspiracy against him. Two accused were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The verdict also exposed weaknesses in the investigation. Several witnesses turned hostile, including jail personnel who had initially been treated as key witnesses. The result was a courtroom ending that was very different from the street-level narrative that had dominated Indore’s crime discussions for years.

The gang war did not remain frozen in the 2000s. Some surviving names from that era reappeared years later in other criminal and business-linked disputes. In 2021, Indore again saw violence linked to the city’s liquor trade when businessman Arjun Thakur was shot during a dispute at a syndicate office in Scheme 74. Police named Satish Bhau among the accused in that case, bringing back memories of the older gang rivalries that had once unsettled the city.

The liquor syndicate dispute pointed to a larger reality: the form of urban power had changed, but the ingredients remained familiar — contracts, cash flow, territory, intimidation and political proximity.

Meanwhile, the families and associates linked to the old underworld era moved in different directions. Some stayed in the shadows. Some entered business. Some sought social or political legitimacy. Indore, like many fast-growing cities, absorbed its old conflicts into new forms of influence.

The story also intersects with another powerful name in Indore’s public memory: Vishnu Prasad Shukla, popularly known as “Bade Bhaiya.” He was a senior BJP figure, a dominant local personality and often described in political circles as “Indore’s Bal Thackeray.” However, his story belongs more to the world of politics and mass influence than to the Vishnu Ustad gang war. The comparison is useful only to understand Indore’s culture of strongmen — not to mix separate histories into one.

The Vishnu Ustad-Jeetu Thakur-Yuvraj Ustad saga remains one of Indore’s most talked-about crime chapters because it had every element of a gangster chronicle: a feared don, rebellious protégés, a public murder, a son’s alleged revenge, killings across years, a jail attack and a court case that collapsed against one of the central accused.

But beyond the drama, the story carries a civic warning. Gang wars are rarely only about personal enmity. They grow where land, money, politics, weak policing and public fear meet. Indore moved on, cleaned up its image and became one of India’s most admired urban success stories. Yet this bloody chapter remains a reminder that even cities celebrated for order and enterprise have shadows beneath the bright lights.