Amit Shah

Early life

Amit Anilchandra Shah is born into a Gujarati Hindu Bania family of Mansa on 22 October 1964 at Mumbai. His great-grandfather was the Nagarseth (town's headman/Chief Merchant) of the small Princely state of Mansa. His father, Anilchandra 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 associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindutva paramilitary volunteer organisation, 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.

Early political career

Entry into politics

Shah started his political career in 1982 after joining the RSS. 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, Gadarias 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.

Gujarat state government

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.

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. The act 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.

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.

Rise in national politics

After Modi became the prime-ministerial candidate of the BJP, Shah's influence also increased in the party. They had been accused of sidelining other BJP leaders, such as Lal Krishna Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh. By this time, Shah had gained recognition as an excellent election campaign manager and was dubbed a "modern-day Chanakya and master strategist". Shah was appointed as a BJP general secretary and given charge of Uttar Pradesh (UP). He was chosen not by Modi, but by Rajnath Singh, who had been impressed by the skills Shah displayed in wresting control of various Congress-controlled organisations in Gujarat. The decision did not go down well with many of the party members, who saw him as a liability owing to the criminal charges against him. Political analyst Shekhar Gupta termed the decision as a blunder.

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.

2014 general election campaign

Shah's political career, which had declined after his arrest in 2010, revived after the BJP's victory in the 2014 general election. In Uttar Pradesh, where Shah was the in-charge, the BJP and its allies won 73 out of 80 seats. Shah had been made in-charge of the BJP's campaign in Uttar Pradesh on 12 June 2013, less than a year before the elections. Since February 2012, Shah had spent considerable time in Uttar Pradesh, where he tried to understand the reasons for the Samajwadi Party's victory in the 2012 UP Assembly elections. Shah realised the voters were dissatisfied with the Samajwadi Party, which he believed had failed to keep its election promises after the win. He also took advantage of the OBC voters' displeasure with the UP government's decision to create a 4.5% reservation for the minorities within the 27% OBC quota in government jobs and education.

Shah oversaw the candidate selection, emphasising the candidate's local popularity and winning potential as the only criteria for selection, as opposed to the candidate's party loyalty or ideology. His team estimated that only 35% of the BJP's traditional supporters had voted in the UP elections. Therefore, he focused on door-to-door campaigning at the booth-level. He set up a 7-to-10 member management committee for each of the 140,000 voting booths in the state. For each booth, his team collated lists of voters and reached out to them. Shah's team used 450 GPS-enabled mobile vans (video raths) to reach out to the masses in remote areas, where media reach was negligible. Shah covered 76 out of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies. He also insisted on Modi contesting election from Varanasi.

Shah convinced Modi to utilise RSS volunteers for grassroots campaigning, which proved highly beneficial for the BJP. Although the RSS officially were not involved in electioneering, Shah used its volunteers to mobilise and monitor the campaigners. For example, the RSS volunteers would cross-check a BJP worker's claims of having targeted a given number of households. Shah also helped organise "mega rallies" for Modi. Like other major political parties, the BJP provisioned one van per village to transport people to the rally venue. However, unlike others, Shah decided that the BJP would not provide money for hiring these vehicles. Instead, he declared that the party workers organising the transportation would be the leaders of the BJP units in their villages. This strategy ensured several local village leaders developed a stake in Modi's victory.

Critics accused Shah of trying to polarise the UP voters along the religious lines. While visiting Ayodhya for a meeting with the party's local committee, he raised the Ayodhya dispute. The BJP fielded three candidates accused of inciting violence during the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. These were seen as attempts to target the party's Hindu nationalist base. An FIR was registered against Shah for a speech in Muzaffarnagar, where he urged the voters to seek "revenge" through their votes. He also took advantage of Shia Muslim antipathy towards Sunni Muslims in Lucknow.

National President of the BJP (2014–2019)

In July 2014, the BJP's central parliamentary board unanimously approved Shah's appointment as president of the party. He was re-elected as the party's president unanimously on 24 January 2016. After becoming the party president, Shah started an aggressive membership drive, and by March 2015, BJP had claimed 100 million members.

In 2014 to 2016, BJP achieved success in Legislative Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand and Assam but lost the elections in Delhi and Bihar.

Shah also spearheaded campaigning in the 2017 assembly elections, which resulted in the party's success in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. This was the BJP's greatest run in recent elections; they won 312 seats out of 403. The BJP also progressed in Manipur. The BJP won the 2017 Gujarat Legislative Assembly polls for a record six times and wrested power from Congress during the 2017 Himachal Pradesh Legislative Assembly polls. In March 2018, the BJP won for the first time in the left-ruled north-eastern state of Tripura, where they won two-thirds of the votes. The BJP also made gains in Nagaland and Meghalaya and formed a government in both states with its allies.

Shah led the BJP to victory in the 2019 Indian general election; he became the most successful BJP president. During the election campaign, he visited 312 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, holding 18 roadshows, 161 public meetings and over 1,500 BJP meetings. Shah had given BJP workers a seemingly audacious target of crossing 300 seats (Ab ki Baar 300 paar) an initiative he called "Mission 300 Par". The mission was accomplished under his leadership as party president cementing BJP undisputed king of India's political terrain.

He is an admirer of Chanakya and often referred to as a modern-day Chanakya, who had skilfully replaced the Nanda dynasty by the young Chandragupta Maurya. Responding to questions about a portrait of Chanakya at his New Delhi residence in 2016, he said: "[I admire] Chanakya because he was knowledgeable. His sutras are eternal. Economics, politics, and the problem of governance are all there." The Bhagavata Purana is another of his favourite books, which he studied when he was in prison in 2010 in connection with the death of Sohrabuddin Sheikh.

Union Cabinet Minister (2019–present)

Minister of Home Affairs

Shah took oath as Cabinet Minister on 30 May 2019 and took office as Minister of Home Affairs on 1 June 2019.

On 5 August 2019, Shah moved a resolution to scrap Article 370 in the Rajya Sabha and divide the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two, with Jammu and Kashmir serving as one of the union territories, and Ladakh serving as a separate union territory. In September 2019, with reference to the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, he stated that it is an important move towards an "Akhand Bharat". On the fourth anniversary of the resolution Shah stated that the union territory has seen positive progress in terms of development and peace. In September 2025, Shah said that following the resolution in 2019, the central government implemented a holistic plan for the union territory which included development, education, poverty reduction, and countering of Pakistan sponsored terrorism. Violence has also reduced.

In September 2019, Shah talked about how India needs one unifying language; he said the Hindi language should be spoken to unite the country and represent India in the world. In a tweet, he also appealed to the Indian people to increase the use of the Hindi language. In reaction to Amit Shah's statements, Congress said that the three language formula should not be fiddled with. Shah has said that Hindi is a friend to other languages, and not a competitor.

On 19 November 2019, Shah declared in the Rajya Sabha of the Indian parliament that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be implemented throughout the country.

In December 2019, he introduced the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, which grants Indian citizenship to religiously persecuted minority communities who migrated to the country before 2015 from the Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. In Northeast India, the act raised concerns about the impact of immigration on local culture and politics, which caused people to protest against the Act. Elsewhere, the opposition parties criticised the Act's exclusion of Muslims as detrimental to India's pluralism. Shah insisted the bill was not anti-Muslim, because it did not change their existing path to citizenship.

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.

Electoral performance

Since 1989, Shah has fought 28 elections to various local bodies.

Personal life

Shah has six sisters, two of whom live in Chicago. Shah's mother died from an illness on 8 June 2010. He is married to Sonal Shah and the couple have a son named Jay Shah. They have three grandchildren.

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.