Durlabh Kashyap

Timeline

1. 2000Born in Ujjain, according to Hindi and English profiles of him. The exact date is not documented.^[1]^[2]
2. 2016Enters the criminal world at fifteen or sixteen and begins to build a gang, according to TheSootr, which dates his arrival in crime to that age.^[2]^[4]
3. 2017Begins using Facebook and Instagram as the gang's advertisement. His profile describes him as a known criminal and invites people to make contact to settle disputes.^[2]^[4]
4. 2018Has cases against him before he is eighteen, including robbery and assault, and is treated by the local police as a history-sheeter.^[1]^[3]
5. 2020Killed in September at a tea stall in the Helawadi area of Ujjain, in what the Hindi press describes as a gang war.^[2]^[3]
6. 2024Weapons are still being advertised for sale on Facebook using his photographs, four years after his death.^[3]
7. 2023 onwardsPolice in Deoria, Kanpur and Varanasi report young men copying his style and his methods, in cases that have nothing to do with Ujjain.^[5]^[6]^[7]

Who Durlabh Kashyap was

Durlabh Kashyap was a gang leader from Ujjain, the temple town in western Madhya Pradesh, who became known far outside it because of how he presented himself online. He was born in 2000, formed a gang while still in his teens, and was killed in September 2020 at about twenty.^[1][2] In the five years since, his name has appeared in police reporting from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, almost never as a person and always as a brand that other young men want to borrow.^[5][6][7]

The outline of his life is short and most of it is in the public record because the police and the press put it there. He was a school age boy in a city of about half a million people, he was drawn to the image of the gangster that films and social media sold, and he built a following by performing that image in public.^[1][2] The performance was the point. The black scarf, the kohl, the red mark on the forehead and the photographs with weapons were all part of it, and the audience he was performing for was made up mostly of teenagers.^[2][4]

What he was not, in the accounts available, was a large criminal operator. He was a local figure with a gang of young men, a set of cases that include robbery, assault and extortion, and a talent for publicity.^[1][2] The gap between the reach of his name and the size of his organisation is the most striking thing about his story, and it is the reason his afterlife has been more consequential than his career.

Ujjain, and why a gang could grow there

Ujjain is one of the oldest cities in central India and one of the most visited, because of the Mahakaleshwar temple and the Kumbh that it hosts. It is also a mid sized provincial city with the ordinary problems of one: a large population of young men with few jobs, a coaching economy that pulls students in from the surrounding districts, and a local policing system that works through history-sheets and informers rather than through investigation.^[3]

That combination is what a gang needs. A group of young men with a reputation can charge shopkeepers and contractors for protection, settle disputes for a fee, and use the threat of violence to collect debts, all without controlling territory in the way a city gang would.^[3] The police in Madhya Pradesh describe such men as history-sheeters, a category that puts a person under surveillance rather than in prison, and Kashyap was one of them by his late teens.^[3]

What made him different from the history-sheeters around him was that he understood that reputation in a small city now travels through a phone. A threat that would once have circulated through word of mouth could be posted, screenshotted and forwarded. He built his name that way, and the same mechanism kept the name alive after the person behind it had been killed.^[2][3]

The Facebook profile as a business card

The most documented part of his career is his use of social media. Amar Ujala, in a podcast episode about him, describes him as a criminal who used social media the way others use an advertisement, and quotes the text he carried on his Facebook page: that murder, extortion and every kind of dispute were settled through him.^[4] TheSootr reports the same line in slightly different words, adding that his profile identified him as a known criminal and invited anyone with a dispute to get in touch.^[2]

That is not how a fugitive behaves. It is how a brand behaves. The profile was a shopfront, and the photographs of him holding weapons were its signage. He posted with the gang, in the gang's colours, and the images were staged for the effect they would have on exactly the audience that found them: young men in the same city, in the same colleges, in the same shortage of prospects.^[2][4]

The strategy worked well enough that it outlived him. In February 2024, more than three years after his death, the Naidunia reported that a Facebook page had been created in his name offering pistols, knives and guns for sale, with claims of home delivery. The police said the account had been created about ten months earlier and that action had been taken, and that they were looking for the people behind it.^[3] A second page titled as a question, asking whether Durlabh Kashyap was still alive, was also in circulation.^[3]

Teenagers, and the audience he was recruiting from

Every account of his rise makes the same point in different words: the people around him were young. TheSootr describes a gang built in four or five years by a boy who was himself a minor, drawing in other minors and young men from the city.^[2] Amar Ujala dates his dominance of the local crime scene to the age of sixteen.^[4]

This is the part of the story that the Hindi press treats as a social problem rather than a crime story, and it is where the coverage of his death connects to the coverage of everything that came after. A young man who is famous for carrying a weapon and posting about it becomes a template, especially for boys who have no other route to being noticed. The police in three states have since described exactly that.^[5][6][7]

It should be said plainly that this is not a claim that he recruited hundreds of people or that he ran a training operation. The reporting describes a local gang of young men and a large online audience. The distinction between the two matters, because it is the audience rather than the gang that turned out to be durable.

The police record

By the time he was killed he was a history-sheeter with cases registered against him, and the Hindi reports refer to him simply as a known criminal of the city.^[3] The English aggregator profile lists robbery, assault and extortion among his cases and says he had a record before he turned eighteen.^[1] That broad description is consistent with the Hindi reporting, though the specific number of cases is not given consistently anywhere.

The distinction between an accusation and a conviction matters here and is often lost in profiles of him. Being a history-sheeter means the police have registered cases and are monitoring the person, not that a court has convicted him of the offences in those cases.^[3] Nothing in the record available for this entry establishes that he was convicted of a serious offence, and the page does not claim that he was.

What the record does establish is that the police treated him as a serious local problem. The interest in him after his death, including the tracing of pages that used his name, suggests that the file did not close when he did.^[3]

The killing, September 2020

Durlabh Kashyap was killed in September 2020 at a tea stall in the Helawadi area of Ujjain. Both the Naidunia and TheSootr describe the killing as the result of a gang rivalry, and TheSootr specifies a tea stall as the place where he was stabbed.^[2][3] Hindi reporting has consistently treated the case as a gang war rather than a random attack.

The English aggregator profile gives the date as 6 September 2020 and says he was attacked by members of a rival gang at a tea shop, that he sustained thirty four stab wounds and died at the scene.^[1] The wound count and the exact date are not corroborated by the Hindi reports consulted for this entry, which give only the month and the locality, and they are treated here as the aggregator's account rather than as established fact.

His age at death is given as nineteen in the aggregator profile and as twenty in TheSootr.^[1][2] Both are plausible readings of a birth in 2000 and a death in September 2020, and the discrepancy is a useful reminder that almost nothing about him was documented by anyone other than the people writing about him afterwards.

The name after the death

The most reported fact about Kashyap in recent years is that his name is still in use. In February 2024, the Naidunia reported that weapons were being sold on Facebook using his photograph, with claims of home delivery and with the gang's style carried over into the advertising. The police said the page had been created about ten months earlier and that a case had been registered.^[3] TheSootr reported the same phenomenon in an article comparing him with an Indore gangster, Salman Lala, who was killed in 2025, and made the point that in both cases the gang outlived the man by turning him into a hero online.^[2]

The mechanism is not complicated. A dead gangster cannot be arrested, contradicted or cross examined. His photograph can be used by anybody, and the fear it produces is free. For young men who want a reputation without yet having one, borrowing a dead man's name is cheaper than building their own, and the platforms do not distinguish between a tribute page and a shopfront.^[2][3]

The police response has been to treat the pages as cases rather than as content. The Naidunia report describes exactly that: an account traced, action taken, and a search for the people who made it.^[3] It is a slow way to deal with a fast problem, and it is the only way available under the law.

The copycats

In October 2023, a fifteen year old boy in Deoria district in eastern Uttar Pradesh stabbed another boy of the same age to death, and the Hindustan Times reported that he had been inspired by the Ujjain gangster.^[5] The story is one of several in which young men in other states are described by the police as imitating him.

In Kanpur, the Dainik Bhaskar reported a case in which a group spread fear in an attempt to be like him, with one accused still at large.^[6] In Varanasi, the Amar Ujala reported that a man accused of murdering a BJP leader wanted to become a gangster like the one from Ujjain.^[7] None of these crimes had anything to do with his gang, his city or his associates. They were all, in the police's description, about the image.

That is the finding that makes his case worth recording rather than merely recounting. A social media gangster in a provincial city produced a template that travelled further than any gang he could have built, and the template is still being copied in districts he never visited.^[5][6][7] The police in Madhya Pradesh have said as much in their own reporting on the pages that use his name.^[3]

What has not been confirmed

His date of birth is not documented. The aggregator profile gives 8 November 2000, and the year is consistent with his age at death in the Hindi reports, but no school record, police record or family statement has been published.^[1][2]

The exact date of his death is also unsettled. The aggregator gives 6 September 2020 and says he died at the scene after thirty four stab wounds.^[1] The Hindi reporting consulted here gives September 2020 and the Helawadi locality but not the day, the number of wounds or the names of the attackers.^[2][3] The detailed version is therefore attributed and not adopted.

The number of criminal cases against him is reported differently in different places, and none of the figures can be checked against a court record. The aggregator says he faced several charges before he turned eighteen; the Hindi press calls him a history-sheeter without giving a count.^[1][3]

His family background is given only by the aggregator, which describes a middle class Brahmin household in Ujjain with parents who were both teachers, and names them.^[1] No news outlet has confirmed those names or that description, and because they are private individuals the entry does not print them.

His net worth is not known and cannot be estimated. The aggregator says so directly, and the income from the activities described in the reporting would not appear in any document that could be checked.^[1]

His height, education and the name of the school or college he attended are not published anywhere that this entry could find.^[1]

The identity of the people who killed him has not been established in the public record. No report consulted for this entry names a convict, and the case is described in the Hindi press as a gang rivalry without a named accused.^[2][3]