Amit Shah

Amitbhai Anilchandra Shah was born 22 October 1964 is an Indian politician who is currently serving as the 32nd Minister of Home Affairs since May 2019 and the 1st Minister of Co-operation since July 2021. He is also the member of parliament (MP) for Gandhinagar. He served as the 10th president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 to 2020. He has also served as chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) since 2014. He had been elected as a member of the upper house of parliament, Rajya Sabha, from Gujarat from 2017 to 2019. A chief strategist of the BJP, he is a close aide to Narendra Modi. He was also the member of the Gujarat Legislative Assembly from Naranpura from 2012 to 2017 and Sarkhej from 1997 to 2012 and the minister of State for Home, Law and Justice, Prison, Border Security, Civil Defence, Excise, Home Guards, Transport, Prohibition, Gram Rakshak Dal, Police Housing, Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs, government of Gujarat in the Modi ministry from 2002 to 2012. During his college days, Shah was a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). At the age of 18, he secured a position in the ABVP and joined the BJP in 1987. Shah was the BJP's in-charge for India's largest and politically most crucial state, Uttar Pradesh, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP-led NDA won 73 out of 80 seats. As a result, Shah rose to national prominence and was appointed as the party's national president in July 2014. He has played an organising and membership-promotional role in the elections of many states since 2014. In his initial two years, the BJP achieved success in legislative assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Assam but lost ground in Delhi and the large eastern state of Bihar in 2015. In 2017, he was partly credited with the party victories in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Manipur, but the Akali-BJP alliance lost power in the larger Punjab election. In 2018, the party lost power in the states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. A year later, the BJP won 303 seats to get a majority in the 2019 Indian general election under Shah's leadership.

Early life
Shah was born in Mumbai on 22 October 1964. He is from a Gujarati Hindu family of the Bania caste. His great grandfather was the Nagarseth (Capital city chief) of the small state of Mansa. His father, Anil Chandra Shah, a businessman from Mansa, owned a successful PVC pipe business. He went to school in Mehsana and moved to Ahmedabad to study biochemistry at CU Shah Science College. He graduated with a Bachelor's of Science (B.Sc.) in Biochemistry and then worked for his father's business. He also worked as a stockbroker and in co-operative banks in Ahmedabad. Shah was involved with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since childhood; he participated in the neighbourhood shakhas (branches) as a boy. He formally became an RSS swayamsevak (volunteer) during his college days in Ahmedabad. He first met Narendra Modi in 1982 through the Ahmedabad RSS circles. At that time, Modi was an RSS pracharak (propagator), working as in-charge of youth activities in the city.

Entry into politics
Shah started his political career in 1982 after joining the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu volunteer organisation. Soon after, he got acquainted with Narendra Modi, a pracharak (propagator) of the RSS at that time. Reportedly, he was advised by Modi to join the student wing of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). Soon after Shah joined the ABVP in the year 1983. Later on, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1987, one year before Modi joined the party. He became an activist of the BJP's youth wing, Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), in 1987. He gradually rose in the BJYM hierarchy, in which he held various posts including ward secretary, taluka secretary, state secretary, vice-president and general secretary. He became known for his management skills when he was the election campaign manager for Lal Krishna Advani in Gandhinagar during the 1991 Lok Sabha elections. In 1995, the BJP formed its first government in Gujarat, with Keshubhai Patel as Chief Minister. At that time, the Indian National Congress, the BJP's main rival, was highly influential in rural Gujarat. Modi and Shah worked together to eliminate Congress in the rural areas. Their strategy was to find the second-most influential leader in every village and get them to join the BJP. They created a network of 8,000 influential rural leaders who had lost elections to the pradhan (village chief) post in various villages. Modi and Shah used the same strategy to reduce Congress' influence over the state's powerful co-operatives, which played an important role in the state's economy. In 1999, Shah was elected as the president of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB), the biggest cooperative bank in India. In Gujarat, such elections had traditionally been won on caste considerations, and the co-operative banks had traditionally been controlled by Patels, Gaderias and Kshatriyas. Despite not belonging to any of these castes, Shah won the election. At that time, the bank was on the verge of collapse, as they had accumulated losses of 36 crores. Shah turned around the bank's fortune within a year; the following year, the bank registered a profit of 27 crores. By 2014, its profit had increased to around 250 crores. Shah also ensured that 11 of the bank's 22 directors were BJP loyalists. Modi and Shah also sought to reduce Congress' hold over sports bodies in the state. Shah served as the president of the Gujarat State Chess Association. In 2009, he became the vice-president of the profitable Gujarat Cricket Association (GCA), while Modi served as its president. In 2014, after Modi became Prime Minister of India, Shah became the president of GCA. Modi, who had become a general secretary in the party's state unit by the early 1990s, used his influence to get bigger roles for Shah. He convinced Patel to appoint Shah as the chairman of the Gujarat State Financial Corporation, a public sector financial institution that finances small and medium-scale enterprises. After Shankersinh Vaghela and some other leaders complained about Modi's growing popularity in the Gujarat government, the party leadership moved Modi out of Gujarat to the BJP headquarters in Delhi. During this time (1995–2001), Shah served as Modi's confidante in Gujarat. In 1997, Modi lobbied to get Shah a BJP ticket for the Gujarat Legislative Assembly by-election in Sarkhej. Shah became an MLA in February 1997 after winning the by-election. He retained his seat in the 1998 Assembly elections.

Gujarat state government
PM Modi addresses a BJP National Council Meeting. In October 2001, the BJP replaced Keshubhai Patel with Narendra Modi as the chief minister of Gujarat after allegations of inefficient administration. Over the next few years, Modi and Shah gradually sidelined their political rivals. Shah contested the 2002 Assembly election from the Sarkhej constituency in Ahmedabad. He won by the highest margin among all candidates, with 158,036 votes. He improved his margin of victory in the 2007 Assembly election, in which he won from Sarkhej again. During Modi's twelve-year tenure as the Gujarat CM, Shah emerged as one of the most powerful leaders in Gujarat. After winning the 2002 elections, he became the youngest minister in the Modi government and was given multiple portfolios. At one time, he held 12 portfolios: Home, Law and Justice, Prison, Border Security, Civil Defence, Excise, Transport, Prohibition, Home Guards, Gram Rakshak Dal, Police Housing and Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs. In 2004, the Congress-led government announced its intention to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which they called regressive. Shah piloted the Gujarat Control of Organised Crime (Amendment) Bill through the Gujarat State Assembly amid an opposition walk-out. Shah also played an important role in convincing the Modi government to pass the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, which made religious conversions difficult in the state of Gujarat. Shah was accused of sidelining the police officers who testified against the Gujarat government in cases related to the fake encounters and the 2002 riots. Shah has also been accused of manipulating the electoral constituency delimitation exercise in Gujarat to favour the BJP.

Criticism
PM Modi visits Shauryanjali, a commemorative exhibition on the 1965 war. During his time as a general secretary of the BJP, party members credited Shah with promoting Hindutva, encouraging Hindu voters to reject "protectors of minorities", and opposing Modi's attempts to reconcile with the Muslim community. Shah convinced the Modi government in Gujarat to pass the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act in 2003, which requires religious conversions in the state – most of which are from Hinduism to other religions – to be approved by a district magistrate. Shah portrayed the bill as a measure against forced conversions, although critics claimed that the bill undermined the Indian Constitution. Between 2011 and 2016, approximately half of the applications for religious conversion in Gujarat were declined by the local government. In 2014, EC barred Shah from conducting any public processions, marches, gatherings and roadshows in Uttar Pradesh due to speeches that were made to outrage the religious feelings and beliefs of different classes. In 2018, Shah said: "Infiltrators are like termites in the soil of Bengal," and regarding the solution of this, stated: "A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal." In December 2019, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) asked the US administration to consider imposing sanctions against Shah if the Indian parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. USCIRF in its statement said: "CAB is a dangerous turn in the wrong direction; it runs counter to India's rich history of secular pluralism and the Indian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law regardless of faith." The commission said that the CAB "enshrines a pathway to citizenship for immigrants that specifically excludes Muslims, setting a legal criterion for citizenship based on religion". The external affairs ministry issued a counter-statement in response to USCIRF by saying it was not based on facts and the bill was to grant citizenship to persecuted religious minorities who arrived in India and does not aim to strip citizenship.

Personal life
Shah is married to Sonal Shah and the couple have a son named Jay Shah. Shah's mother died from an illness on 8 June 2010. People close to Shah have described him as someone who does not like to socialise much. He has six sisters, two of whom live in Chicago. In September 2019, he had an operation for lipoma on the back of his neck. On 2 August 2020, Shah tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to the hospital.