Amit Shah

Amit Anilchandra Shah (born 22 October 1964) is an Indian politician serving as the current Minister of Home Affairs who has been President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 to 2020. He was elected to the lower House of Parliament the Lok Sabha in the 2019 Indian general election from Gandhinagar. He was earlier elected as a member of the upper House of Parliament the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat in 2017. He also became the youngest serving full-time Home Minister at an age of 54. He is the chief strategist of the BJP and a close aide to Narendra Modi. During his college days Shah was a member of ABVP, student wing of the RSS. At the age of 18, he secured a position in the ABVP, and joined the BJP in 1987. Shah was first elected in Gujarat as the MLA for a seat partly covering Ahmedabad, Sarkhej in 1997 (a by-election) holding it in 1998, 2002 and 2007 until the seat's 2008 dissolution, then for nearby Naranpura, from 2012-2017. He is a close associate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and held executive portfolios in the state government during Modi's tenure as its Chief Minister. 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 and its allies swept the state, registering their best performance, by winning 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 elections of many states since 2014. In his initial two years, the BJP achieved success in Legislative Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand in 2014 and in Assam but lost ground in Delhi and the large eastern state of Bihar in 2015. He was in 2017 partly credited with the party landslides in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and the party's modern heartland state of Gujarat in which year was marked the party's strong debut in much smaller Manipur, but the Akali-BJP alliance lost power in considerably larger Punjab. In 2018 the party lost power in the states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The next year, BJP won 303 seats to get majority in the 2019 Indian general election, making Shah the most successful BJP President ever.