The shooting of India’s biggest hip hop star

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1:15Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

1:35This is The Fifth Floor, at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world. I'm your host, Farnak Amidi.

1:51In 2022, in a small village in Punjab, India, Siddhu Musawala was shot multiple times and killed in broad daylight. Siddhu was a rapper, maybe one of the most famous Punjabi rappers in the world. A devout Sikh, he wore a turban and took pride in his farming background. But he also rapped about money, power, criminality and guns. Only hours after his death, a man came forward to claim responsibility for his killing, which left people all over the world wondering why. My colleague Ishling Kaur also wanted to find out why, and she's been trying to understand why this beloved musician and poet was murdered.

2:39Her investigation sheds light on the world of Punjabi musicians and gangsters, and is the subject of the new season of World of Secrets podcast. Ishlin joins me right now. Ishlin, welcome back to the Fifth Floor.

2:54Ishleen Kaur:Thanks, Farah. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to have you always. Ishlin, you are from Punjab yourself, so could you just give us some context of the area? Is it a place with a lot of crime? It's like gangster culture, something popular there? Well, I mean, if I started talking about Punjab, I think I need a whole episode. I grew up in Punjab in the 90s. You know, it's often said that Punjab's imprint is larger than its footprint, which means the idea of Punjab looms far larger than the reality on ground. So when you visit Punjab, you are greeted by vast stretches of golden mustard fields.

3:38Ishleen Kaur:Yet beneath this beautiful and picturesque surface lie the hidden struggles of its people. So for example, when I went to Punjab recently, my grand aunt said to me, Punjab today feels like a sinking ship. I think if past this prologue, you know, she may well be right, because there's this growing culture of gangsterism, the normalization of weapons, and almost like a climate of fear, which does point to unsettling times ahead. And it all of this has a history, Farunek. It's not just appeared out of nowhere, right? I mean, Punjab is a land of paradoxes. It cradles one of the most egalitarian faiths, a Sikh faith, which Hussiddu was a divine Sikh.

4:20Ishleen Kaur:But the Punjab I grew up in was a place where lawlessness prevailed. But it was a shared weight of our historical tragedies that brought us closer. And there was this common humanity. But the ghosts of our past now haunt us. whether you were alive to witness the horrors of the partition of India or the dark days of militancy in the 1980s so this is like going back to the history of Punjab we have all of us who grew up in Punjab we've lived it vicariously through the memories and pains of our parents and grandparents and it was this pain that was then weaponized by the political leaders what they did was they lured the youth of Punjab into illegal pursuits like land grabbing drug trafficking.

5:03Ishleen Kaur:So I saw a lot of that when I was growing up. And ultimately, what happened as a result of these illegal trades was there was a rise in gangsterism. And when I go back to Punjab now, I see that it's at its peak. In fact, when I went to Chandigarh, which is the capital of Punjab and Haryana, I saw people walking around in coffee shops and cafes with a pistol. a revolver. I met someone in a cafe to have a coffee who then was flaunting a revolver in his pocket and I just couldn't make sense of it. That must be so scary, Shaleen. It was, but you know also very sad for me, Farhana, because having grown up there I am now met with a reality which is so stark.

5:50I think you painted a really good picture of the situation in Punjab for us. But now let's talk about Sidhu Musawala himself. What is his backstory? How did he become this famous hip hop star?

6:06Ishleen Kaur:Sidhu Musawala, which is his stage name, because his real name was Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu. And he came from Mansa in the village Musa. So this is what Sidhu of Musa. That's what Sidhu Musa. So he like like a lot of Punjabis, he moved to Canada. And it's in Canada where his journey began, because that's where he overnight became a global megastar. He was a village boy and someone who became a musical colossus. And people often say that he's one of the most ubiquitous faces of Punjab's fertile hip hop scene. So he wasn't always like this. He started very young, singing folk songs, traditional ballads rooted in Punjab history.

6:46Ishleen Kaur:But it was once he moved to Canada, he discovered American hip hop, and everything changed. He transformed Punjabi folk into rap. And he created a new genre sort of. And I think what really stood out for people like me, or people in the diaspora, or people in Punjab was seeing a turbaned Sikh, stepping out of the usual mode, breaking free, you know, from all the sort of boxes people would have tried to put him in. He challenged the status quo. He didn't play by the rules. And he wasn't afraid to talk back or clap back at his critics. It was literally what you saw, what you got. And that's what the fans connected with.

7:33Ishleen Kaur:And like I said, he became a mega star. And it seems like he was very much influenced by the 90s gangster rap movement of the US. was that really his lifestyle is that the sort of thing he was really involved in I mean like you said Faranak he his his idea his idol was Tupac Shakur you know he really borrowed from American rap and if you look at American rap and also Punjabi hip-hop both scenes love to flex that tough guy image in Punjabi there's a word gabru which lines up pretty well with gangster in American hip-hop, which is like sort of the loud, proud, ready-to-stand-my-ground kind of thing.

8:20Ishleen Kaur:Siddhu, if you look at his journey, like I said, he started singing on traditional Punjabi folk, but very soon turned it into something really different. Whether Siddhu was involved in the gangster lifestyle when he entered the music industry remains unclear only because there's no concrete evidence to support that. But friends of Siddhu that I spoke with mentioned that as soon as Sidhu Musayala became famous, he was receiving threatening phone calls. Although no one ever revealed who was behind those phone calls. Now, during our investigation, we discovered that gangsters were indeed making these threats.

8:59Ishleen Kaur:And it then became evident that the Punjabi music industry is deeply entangled with criminal networks and with this whole extortion network. Was this gangster image necessary for him to reach this level of success in Punjabi hip hop? You know, if you look at Punjabi music, and in the 90s itself, this was probably when Sidhu Musiala was just born. Punjabi music was about gangster roleplay. It was about looking at my guns, big talk, acting tough, and looking at my cars. And at the risk of sounding repetitive, it's true that Punjabi music has long carried this undercurrent of machismo, songs steeped in bravado and hyper-masculine displays of valor, and often glorifying weapons and violence.

9:52Ishleen Kaur:Siddharth Musayala was also, when he started, he was known for lyrics that romanticized the firearms. And this was what a lot of people, young Punjabis, did like. They liked the way he embodied these tropes. Although I must say here that his music, he started with this, but then as he became more and more famous, you saw a more nuanced and a more introspective artist within Sidhu, where he did challenge status quo. He spoke about and sang about a lot larger issues. Yeah, he became quite political later with his music and his lyrics, because he wrote his lyrics himself as well. So you see that kind of evolution in his work.

10:35As I mentioned, he did become more political and he actually went to a huge farmers protest in Punjab in 2020. And he sang a song there. And we also have another clip of that. Let's have a listen.

11:09Vishnu, what is he saying? Now, this is really big talk. It's very provocative, I must warn you. The farmers' protest in India in 2020 was a big event,

11:21Ishleen Kaur:especially for Punjab, for Haryana, these two states, and for anyone related to farming. Siddhu, being a farmer's son, went to a rally and he's challenging the central government. So what he's saying here is, Delhi, I want to give you a warning. Listen to me carefully. If he says, which means if you lay your hands on my turban or on our turbans, we're not going to stop at protests. We'll bring you down. And he said, tell Modi that the farmer's son is here to spoil his plan. So he really went straight on, challenged the government, challenged the prime minister. So would you say that his reputation was changing?

12:09Because he was very popular and he was making these political statements. Was he someone that people looked at as someone who could have political impact? Absolutely, Faranek. So like I said, you know, when Sidhu Musiala went to Canada to pursue a dream, but he was one of the very few people who returned to Punjab. Now, a lot of people who moved from India to another country looking to pursue their dreams, make more money. He had everything in Canada and could have established more. But he chose to come back to Punjab despite his international fame.

12:47Ishleen Kaur:He remained deeply connected to his roots, his village, which was an underdeveloped region. And also, I think if I'm not wrong, it is the it is what it has one of the highest rates of farmer suicide. And for Sidhu Musayala, it became it became personal. He became poetic about it. He was talking about all these issues. He was talking about the sociopolitical issues of India, of Punjab, writing lyrics about it and turning them into music. And what really struck a chord with young Punjabis and Sikhs was they hadn't seen someone, an artist especially. I mean, also people I've interviewed, I must say, they've never even seen a politician talk about these issues in the manner that Sidhu spoke.

13:37Ishleen Kaur:And that's when people thought, that's when he became an icon for the youth, when he stood up for the farming community or the young people during the farmers' protest, when he started thinking about the Indian penal code. So he really started being very, very political. And it was in May 2022 that his life was cut short. He was killed in his own car in a hail of bullets. how did you hear about it and what was the reaction from people like you and the youth i remember this so clearly faranak i was in maternity leave i was on twitter and suddenly get a tweet all it says is so we didn't still know for the first few hours whether he was dead or not.

14:28Ishleen Kaur:My whole family, a massive fan of Sidhu, my brother from Canada, calls me up and we're going through this breaking news on watching the Indian news channels together. And when it's confirmed that Sidhu Musawala was shot dead, we were numb. Because it's a place where you've grown up. It's an artist you follow. Did you like his music? I did. I did. And like I said, my whole family did. The good thing, Faranak, was that his music transcended generations. So there was a track I could dance to, my grand-aunt would dance to, my parents would dance to. And it's no hyperbole if I say his death was a personal tragedy to every Punjabi because we lost a young, talented person because it's a place where you've grown up and although you've witnessed some sort of violence, you've heard about the horrors of the militancy.

15:24This was a big moment, a watershed moment in the history of Punjab, in the recent history of Punjab. And I remember just thinking to myself, I will find out what happened. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. With the new Schwab teen investor account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously.

16:08Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts.

16:41Thank you. Bye.

16:46I'm Farina Kamidi and today on the fifth floor, we are finding out about the murder of Sidhu Musawala. So after he was murdered, someone quickly claimed the murder and said he was behind it. It was a man called Goldie Brar. Tell us about this guy. Who is this Goldie? Goldie Brar took responsibility on social media. Yes. But at the time, nothing was known about him. In fact, I think for the longest time, people thought he was just someone, his name, it was like a pseudonym being used. So for very long, people doubted if he existed.

17:25Ishleen Kaur:But when I started investigating this, I found out Goldie Prah, a young lad from Punjab, his real name is Satindarjeet Singh. He was in Chandigarh studying with a lot of young Punjabis in a university called Punjabi University. So all these guys were very active in student politics at the time in Punjab. And then recently he was reported to be a member of one of the most notorious gangs of India, the Lawrence Pishnoye gang. And he is on the Interpol list now. And at the time when he claimed responsibility for Siddhu's murder, the intelligence agencies of India thought that he was in Canada. But really, right now, no one knows where Goldie Brahe is.

18:13He's an international fugitive. Why did you choose to work on this story? What was it about this story that was so intriguing that you wanted to dig deeper to find out more about it? Like I said, Farhan, it just felt so personal, a tragedy. I wanted to know what lied beneath it. It just, something didn't add up. It was too shocking and appalling, but also too complex a story to make sense of. How these gangs have emerged and how someone can just go around and kill a Punjabi singer, almost like an international celebrity in broad daylight that just so brazenly really troubled me. To some extent, I was also very interested in finding out how two young Punjabis, Goldie Bra and Siddi Musiala, who were growing up in Punjab at the same time, one goes to be an international artist and one becomes an international fugitive.

19:14And something that is quite striking about your investigation, Ishleen, is how many of the people that you were trying to speak to were willing to speak to you anonymously, but a lot of people also were not going to talk to you under any conditions. Why is that? You know, this is what still escapes me. The moment you say, people just don't want to talk to you. There were people who would talk to me off the record, which was let's meet for coffee and talk and would tell me things. But honestly, for every one person we interviewed, 10 people said no. This has been one of the hardest projects that I've worked on because there was this impenetrable wall of silence where people just didn't want us to work.

20:05Ever since I started working this, I was always warned to not ask these questions, to not talk about his story, to not talk about the gangsters. And like I said in the very beginning, when we started this chat, Varanek, that there's a climate of fear in Punjab that I've witnessed myself now from my last trip where people just don't want to even say the word gangsters out loud. It's interesting how on one hand it's glorified and on the other hand people don't want to talk about it. True, exactly. And I'm hoping that after people watch this documentary, probably they feel that they have more agency to talk about it and they can shed some more light on it.

20:56Of course, for your investigation, it was crucial to be able to speak to the man who claims that he killed Sidhu, Goldibrar. How hard was it to track him down? I killed Goldibrar for a long time. I mean, I always knew there was never going to be a straight path to reaching because he's an international fugitive. The agencies are after him.

21:21Ishleen Kaur:And I'm sure you will understand this, Farunak, because being a journalist, we know that questioning Goldiebra mattered. He was the one who publicly claimed responsibility for Sidhu's murder. And getting his voice in the film was very crucial for me. So for months, I went through every possible channel. It was really a long, drawn-out process. It's reaching out, waiting for months, hearing nothing, and then trying again. So it was a constant cycle of persistence and patience, but it was one I knew was going to be worth it. And then when he agreed, you know, it was just out of the blue, things moved very fast.

22:00And again, this morning I remember so vividly, Chris bought a morning, I get a call, I answer, he says, I'm Goldie Brahe. He agreed to talk. The next morning, we're interviewing him. Wow. How did that feel? That must feel like an achievement, Nishleen. I think it did, but we were still, until the moment we started interviewing him, we were all very unsure whether he was actually going to turn up. I think it was overpowered by nervousness. The excitement was overpowered by nervousness and being unsure of whether he'd call and then the perils of uh recording an interview you know the technical difficulty so we explored different ways of conducting the interview the phone call didn't work networks didn't work and then we finally decided that we're going to exchange voice messages we were locked in this small um edit suite for over six hours i would record my questions send it to him and then Wow.

23:06So Goldie said to you that his motive for killing Sidhu was revenge. As he said that a friend of him, a friend of Goldie, was murdered by another gang, which Sidhu was connected to. But you actually put a different theory to him. And you said that the main motive was money. And we actually have a clip of you speaking with him, like exchanging these voice notes. Let's have a listen.

23:51So what is he telling you about the killing? so my question to him is Siddhu wasn't a gangster why go after him why wouldn't you go after the real gangsters and he starts by saying because this was one of the later voice notes and I could see I could sense the irritation in his voice so he starts by saying madam I think your homework's incomplete and he starts to explain himself but this is what we found out in our investigation When I interviewed people in Canada, in Punjab, we discovered that actually they have become even more notorious. So although they claim that this was all about honor or justice, but actually, who has benefited from Sidhu's killing?

24:43Because like I said, a lot of people do not even know about Goldie Brahe or the other gangster, the most notorious gangster of India, Lawrence Bishnoy. but it was only after they killed Sidhu. Everyone knew who Goldie Brahe was. In fact, people were pretending to be Goldie Brahe to extort money in Punjab. So like we say in the documentary that, you know, they took this fame, Sidhu's fame, and they transformed it into their notoriety. And for gangs, it is easier to extort money when they have this notoriety. So they made an example of her. Exactly. And they are the most feared gangsters. So Ishleen, after this huge investigation, this really high profile case, what are your reflections?

25:35What are your takeaways from it? You know, when I was watching this documentary after TX, it is striking how a young Punjabi singer who had so much to offer, not only in terms of his talent, but also how much he cared about the state he grew up in, how much he could have achieved for his people and he wanted to. But a life cut short, not only because of rivalry, but it has this whole underlying layer of pain of Punjab's history and Punjab's tragedy. And all of that has somehow developed into an anger amongst the youth. And it's unleashed in such a poor way that the aspirations of young Punjabis today is not to study law or not to study engineering.

26:37Ishleen Kaur:engineering or, you know, when growing up in those days, this is the, these were the aspirations people had or any, any sort of conventional way of following a career path. Their aspiration is to make money quick. Their aspiration is to own more number of weapons. Their aspiration is to know the most notorious people or become one. It just shows a very, very sad state of affairs in, in Punjab. Thank you, Ishleen Kaur. Ishleen's Investigation is the new series of World of Secrets podcast, which you can listen to now. Just search for The Killing Call wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Farhanak Hamidi.