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AMIT SHAH
Amit Anilchandra Shah (born 22 October 1964) is an Indian politician and the current Minister of Home Affairs who has been President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014. 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 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. After working tirelessly for the organisation, he was sent to 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 Amit Shah the most successful BJP President ever.

Life
Amit Shah was born in Mumbai on 22 October 1964. His family were well-to-do Gujarati Hindu Baniya family. His great grandfather was the nagarseth of the small state of Mansa. His father Anil Chandra Shah, a businessman from Mansa, owned a successful PVC pipe business.He did his schooling in Mehsana and moved to Ahmedabad to study biochemistry at CU Shah Science College. He graduated with a B.Sc. degree in biochemistry, and then worked for his father's business.He also worked as a stockbroker and in co-operative banks in Ahmedabad.

Shah was involved with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh since childhood, participating in the neighbourhood shakhas (branches) as a boy. He formally became an RSS swayamsevak (volunteer) during his college days in Ahmedabad. He first met Narendra Modi in 1982 through Ahmedabad RSS circles. At that time, Modi was an RSS pracharak (propagator), working as in-charge of youth activities in city.

Political career
Amit Shah started his political career as a leader of the student wing of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, in 1983.He joined BJP in 1987, one year before Modi joined the party. He became an activist of BJP's youth wing Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) in 1987. He then gradually rose in the BJYM hierarchy, holding various posts including that of ward secretary, taluka secretary, state secretary, vice-president, and general secretary. He came into limelight for his excellent management when he was the election campaign manager for Lal Krishna Advani in Gandhinagar during the 1991 Lok Sabha elections.

In 1995, BJP formed its first government in Gujarat, with Keshubhai Patel as the Chief Minister. At that time, BJP's main rival Indian National Congress was highly influential in rural Gujarat. Modi and Shah worked together to decimate Congress in the rural areas. Their strategy was to find the second most influential leader in every village, and get him or her to join BJP. They created a network of 8,000 influential rural leaders who had lost elections to the pradhan (village chief) post in various villages.