Do we like Amit Shah?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Dehumanising language about migrants and a hardline migration agenda, with only a thin record of real good for people to set against it.
Amit Shah was born in 1964 and came up through Ahmedabad's RSS circles, where he met Narendra Modi in 1982. He led the ABVP student wing from 1983, joined the BJP in 1987 and won the Sarkhej seat four times, becoming the youngest minister in Modi's Gujarat government and holding the Home portfolio there. He was BJP president from 2014 to 2020 and has been Union Home Minister since June 2019, which is why Indian papers call him the party's Chanakya.
The scandal that dogged him for years was the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, a Gujarat police encounter killing. Former investigating officer Amitabh Thakur named him among five people, and all five were discharged by the trial court between 2014 and 2017. In December 2018 a special CBI court in Mumbai acquitted all 22 other accused for lack of evidence, after many witnesses turned hostile. So no court found against him, but critics still say the case left plenty of questions.
The harm check is where he comes unstuck. At a 2018 public meeting in New Delhi he said millions of illegal infiltrators were “eating the country like termites” and should be uprooted. Amnesty India said it was “horrified”, and Human Rights Watch's Andrew Stroehlein called the remarks “disturbing” and warned of a “path to genocide”. The report carries no response from Shah.
The migration hard line hasn't softened. Piloting the Immigration and Foreigners Bill through the Lok Sabha in March 2025, he said “Yeh desh hai, dharamshala nahin”, meaning this country is not a shelter. He rejected calls to send the bill to a parliamentary committee, saying three years of consultation was enough, and it passed by voice vote. Supporters call that border security, and opponents call it a pattern. We can't find a cooperative or kind note in his own words on the topic.
The recent news is a victory lap. On 30 March 2026 he told the Lok Sabha, “I can say that we have become Naxal-free”, and said a bullet would be answered with a bullet. The report couldn't independently check his casualty figures or the claim, and it noted that he accused Rahul Gandhi of links to Naxal sympathisers, which Congress has denied. In May the BJP won West Bengal, with Shah credited as a central figure in the campaign.
On the Gujarat riots, after the Supreme Court upheld the SIT's clean chit to Modi and 63 others in June 2022, Shah spoke up for Modi in an ANI interview. He said “No person is beyond the law” and accused Congress of double standards. The court found no material showing a pre-planned conspiracy. That's the legal outcome, and where you land on the politics is up to you. On the good stuff, the record we could verify is thin: a long public career and a cabinet role since 2019, but no charity or kind acts that turned up.