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print versionThe Independent, 13 April 2014
Last spring, a year ahead of the election now gripping India, Amit Shah was dispatched by Mr Modi to Uttar Pradesh with instructions to build support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the nation’s largest and politically most-important state. He set about identifying candidates and meeting local leaders in an effort to deliver Mr Modi the "wave" he will need to become India’s next prime minister. But while Mr Shah has cemented support for Mr Modi, he has also run into problems. Over the weekend, one week into the five-week voting process to elect a new government, the Election Commission (EC) banned Mr Shah from addressing public meetings in the state, and ordered that charges be filed against him after he was accused of stoking communal tensions.
In speeches in western Uttar Pradesh, which last year saw deadly clashes between Hindus and Muslims, Mr Shah told a gathering of Hindus they should vote for the BJP as a means of "revenge for the insult" inflicted last year. The EC also banned a senior figure from the local Socialist Party, Azam Khan, for making similar speeches to Muslims. "The commission has been observing with serious concern that Azam Khan and Amit Shah have been making highly inflammatory speeches," said the EC. "These statements are promoting feelings of enmity, hatred and ill-will, and creating disharmony between religious communities." It is not the first time Mr Shah, 50, has been under scrutiny. The man said to be a highly skilled political operative, also has a long and controversial history.
In 2010, he was charged with murder and kidnapping over the alleged extrajudicial killing of three people in Gujarat five years earlier and banned from the state while the inquiry went ahead. Out on bail for more than 18 months, he has denied the charges and claimed they were politically motivated. Mr Modi and Mr Shah first met in the 1980s when they were young members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a conservative Hindu nationalist group linked to the BJP. In the early 1990s, Mr Shah, who comes from a wealthy Gujarat family and who has a degree in biochemistry, took charge of the election campaign of a senior party leader, LK Advani.
He secured Mr Advani’s landslide victory and subsequently rose through the ranks. One crucial task he was given was to oversee the party’s representation over constituency realignment. According to Vidyutkumar Anantray Joshi, an academic who has studied the process, the move created more urban constituencies, something that helped the BJP. Mr Shah, who has been elected four times to the Gujarat provincial assembly, became a minister in Mr Modi’s state government in late 2001, shortly before the massacre of hundreds of Muslims by Hindu mobs. Mr Modi has always denied claims that he took insufficient steps to stop the killings. The murder charges against Mr Shah relate to the killing of an alleged gangster, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife and a witness, at a time when the aide was a junior home minister.
At the time of the killings in 2005, it was claimed Mr Sheikh was a jihadi terrorist dispatched by Pakistan’s intelligence service to assassinate Mr Modi and that he had been killed in a shootout with police. But two years later, the state government’s lawyer, KTS Tulsi, stated to India’s Supreme Court that the killings took place while the three were in police custody. Mr Tulsi resigned his position after Mr Modi was perceived to have bragged about the killings during the 2007 state-election campaign. According to the Reuters news agency, the charge sheet filed by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation stated that in his position as home minister Mr Shah headed an extortion racket with Gujarat police officers and Mr Sheikh. They fell out and police snatched Mr Sheikh from a bus with his wife, then staged a gun-battle. Mr Sheikh was killed and his wife’s cremated body was found in the village of one of the policemen. A witness was killed later.
