page_title: Amit Shah
section_title: Sohrabuddin case
hierarchical_section_title: Amit Shah / Controversies / Sohrabuddin case
caption_attribution_description: English: [ L to R ] Shri. Amit Shah, President of the Bharatiya Janata Party with Dr. Udit Raj, National Chairman, All India Confederation of SC/ST Organizations/MP (Lok Sabha), during dalit rally at Talkatora Stadium, New Delhi on 16.01.2015
context_page_description: Amit Anilchandra Shah is an Indian politician currently serving as the Minister of Home Affairs. He served as the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party from 2014 to 2020. He was elected to the lower house of Parliament, Lok Sabha, in the 2019 Indian general elections from Gandhinagar. Earlier, he had been elected as a member of the upper house of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, from Gujarat in 2017. Sworn in at the age of 54, he is the youngest serving full-time Home Minister. He is the chief strategist of the BJP and a close aide to Narendra Modi.
  During his college days, Shah was a member of the ABVP, the 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. He continued to hold it in the 1998, 2002 and 2007 elections until the seat's dissolution in 2008; he then got elected from the nearby Naranpura in 2012. As a close associate of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, he held executive portfolios in the Gujarat state government.
context_section_description: In 2010, Shah was accused of having orchestrated the extrajudicial killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kauser Bi and his criminal associate Tulsiram Prajapati. According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Sheikh had been harassing some marble traders of Rajasthan by demanding protection money. The CBI claimed that two of these marble traders paid Shah to eliminate Sheikh, along with police officers DIG D.G. Vanzara and SP Rajkumar Pandian.
  The CBI presented phone call records, which showed that Shah had been in touch with the accused police officers when the victims were in their custody. It also presented videotapes of Patel brothers' conversations with two of Shah's associates at the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB). The Patel brothers, who had several criminal cases against them, also spoke against Shah.
  Shah dismissed all the accusations against him as politically motivated. He pointed out that during his tenure as Home Minister, Gujarat was one of the states with a small number of police encounters in the country. He stated that he kept in touch with the police officers on the phone in the normal course of his duties as Home Minister. He accused Congress of misusing the CBI and claimed that only the cases in Gujarat were being scrutinized, while the rest of the country had witnessed around 1,500 encounters during the same period. He said if the CBI had any solid evidence against him, it would have been able to frame charges against him. In 2010, Police Commissioner Geeta Johri, who first investigated the case, claimed that the CBI was pressurizing her to falsely implicate Shah in the Sohrabuddin case.
  D.G. Vanzara was also accused in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, but the CBI did not charge Shah.
  Shah was arrested on 25 July 2010 in connection with the Sohrabuddin case. At one time, Shah was considered one of the main contenders for Gujarat Chief Minister. However, his political career was hurt by the arrest; many leaders in the Gujarat government distanced themselves from him. His fellow ministers considered him an autocratic person, who did not have good relations with his colleagues.
  When Shah applied for bail, the CBI raised concerns that he would use his political power to prevent justice from taking its course. On 29 October 2010, the Gujarat High Court granted him bail three months after his arrest. However, the next day, when the courts were closed, Justice Aftab Alam took a petition at his residence to bar him from entering Gujarat. Shah was thus forcibly exiled from the state from 2010 to 2012. He and his wife moved to a room in Gujarat Bhavan, Delhi. Later, the Supreme Court canceled his bail on a CBI plea. In September 2012, the Supreme Court granted him bail and allowed him to return to Gujarat. He then contested and won the 2012 Assembly election from the Naranpura constituency. (The Sarkhej constituency had ceased to exist after delimitation.)
caption: Amit Shah and Udit Raj
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