Analysis: The controversial stock-broker Amit Shah

Narendra Modi has always defended Shah as a victim of conspiracy.

DELHI:

When it comes to making speeches during the election campaign, Indian politicians never miss the chance to make them inflammatory and incite hate and anger, sometimes on the basis of caste but mostly on religion.

Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s most trusted aide and former stock-broker Amit Shah has done it this time: Shah has been issued a notice from the Election Commission over his recent hate speech in the town of Bijnore in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

While addressing a gathering, Shah asked the Jat community to avenge ‘insult’, referring to the previous year’s communal riots in Muzaffarnagar.

Shah, the lieutenant of Narendra Modi, has always been a controversial figure; his name first figured in 2005 for his role in hatching a conspiracy to kill alleged terrorist Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausar Bi. He was charged with what federal agencies claim was a staged encounter to eliminate Sohrabuddin.

In 2010, CBI charged Shah with murder, extortion, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy in the ‘fake’ Sohrabuddin encounter. Shah pleaded innocence and resigned from his post of Gujarat home minister.

In September 2013, a former top Gujarat policeman, DG Vanzara, released an explosive letter from prison accusing Shah of using dirty tactics in Gujarat.

In November 2013, Shah was also implicated in a scandal dubbed ‘stalkergate’, in which he purportedly ordered police officers to trail a woman, ordering them to report her every move.

Currently on bail, Shah is said to be a close confidant of Narendra Modi.

Amidst all these controversies surrounding Shah, last year he was appointed as chief strategist for Uttar Pradesh.

The Muzzafarnagar communal riots in September last year saw many parties jumping into the fray and attempting to polarise the votes. Shah was on this bandwagon, where BJP fielded two candidates linked to the Muzaffarnagar riots.

Once again BJP threw the dice back to the old policies of religion-based politics and that too just before when BJP released its manifesto talking of bringing back the issue of Ram Mandir, which was largely missing in the election campaigns.

Uzair Rizvi is a student of Journalism at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He tweets @RizviUzair

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2014.