Haryanvi singer Ankit Balyan shot dead outside Shamli gym

Haryanvi singer and YouTuber Ankit Balyan was shot dead outside a gym in Shamli, Uttar Pradesh, on Wednesday evening. Police said three or four men fired about 18 rounds as he walked toward his SUV. He was 32 according to Hindustan Times and 35 according to a Times of India district report. Doctors declared him dead after police took him to hospital. One account said a bullet struck his head. Another said he took five wounds.

The shooting happened around 7 p.m. near the Aryapuri drain embankment in the Kotwali police station area, close to CB Gupta Colony. Witnesses told police the attackers waited outside the gym, forced the vehicle door and fled on two motorcycles without registration plates. Officers recovered spent cartridges. Superintendent of Police M.P. Singh, also named as N.P. Singh in one dispatch, said teams had been sent toward possible hideouts in Haryana, including Panipat, and into Punjab. Family members and supporters blocked the Delhi-Muzaffarnagar road near Verma Market Tiraha, about 50 metres from the scene.

Balyan came from Bantikheda, also spelled Bantkheda and Bantikhera in different reports, in Shamli district. He had worked in Rohtak and Sonipat. His YouTube channel had about 3.66 lakh subscribers. The song “Bhari court mein goli marenge” has more than 54 million views. Many of his videos show guns, SUVs and the same swagger that now sits awkwardly beside the crime-scene photographs. About an hour before the shooting he posted an Instagram clip of himself in a car singing a line about a murder on the road.

He was preparing to contest district panchayat elections, according to people around him. Police have not confirmed that as a motive. In 2023 an FIR was filed after a roadshow in Shamli that officers said ran without permission. That file, the gun imagery in the songs and the panchayat plan are the three threads investigators will pull. None of them, on Wednesday night, identified a shooter.

Haryanvi pop has spent a decade selling weapons as costume. The distance between that costume and a real magazine on a Shamli lane collapsed in a few seconds. Officers now have CCTV, cartridge cases and a roadblock of angry relatives. They do not yet have names.

Shamli sits on the western Uttar Pradesh belt where local fame, land, polls and hired guns often share the same phone book. A singer with a few crore views is visible enough to make enemies and rich enough to look like a target. Whether this was politics, a personal feud or a message meant for someone else is the question M.P. Singh’s teams were driving toward Haryana to answer.

The body has gone for post-mortem. The SUVs and the songs remain online. The gym door, the drain embankment and the two bare motorcycles are the physical case. If the cameras caught faces, Wednesday’s killing becomes an arrest story by the weekend. If they caught only helmets, it becomes another western UP file that lives on YouTube longer than it lives in court.

Western Uttar Pradesh police have a template for these cases. Secure CCTV from shops and the gym, trace the motorcycles through nearby tolls, and lean on informants in Shamli and the Haryana towns where Balyan worked. If the shooters were hired, the money trail matters more than the riders. If they were local rivals, someone in Bantikheda already knows the names and is waiting to see whether the family wants a deal or a trial.

The panchayat angle will keep reporters on the story after the roadblock comes down. A candidate who dies the same week he was building a base changes the seat and the police file at once. Officers have not said he had filed papers. They have said they are working on motive. That gap is where rumour lives.

Balyan’s last public clip will be replayed as prophecy. It is not prophecy. It is a man performing the world he sang about, an hour before that world fired back.