India rebuts Canadian claim, defends Modi’s right-hand man Amit Shah
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most trusted and important lieutenant, Amit Shah, has been accused by Ottawa of authorising attacks on Canadian Sikh separatists on Canadian soil.
New Delhi on Saturday defended Shah, who oversees the nation’s internal security forces as home minister, terming the allegations ‘absurd and baseless’.
Shah, 60, is often called India’s second-most powerful person after Modi, whom he has served loyally for decades, and has a fearsome reputation including accusations that he once orchestrated a series of murders.
Their enduring partnership has cemented the Hindu-nationalist worldview of their ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Modi is considered the charismatic frontman mobilising the masses behind the BJP, while Shah is seen as the enforcer keeping subordinates in line.
‘The party is now completely dominated by Narendra Modi — and of course also by Amit Shah… who has been his right-hand man for over 20 years,’ political scientist and India expert Christophe Jaffrelot said in 2024.
Both men began their political careers in Ahmedabad, the biggest city in the western state of Gujarat, where Modi took Shah — 14 years his junior — under his wing.
Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister and Shah was a junior lawmaker when in 2002 the state was rocked by some of the worst religious violence in independent India’s history.
A fire in a train carriage that killed dozens of Hindu pilgrims set off reprisals that killed at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.
Modi was accused of helping stir up the unrest and failing to order a police intervention — claims he denies — and the fallout saw him banned from entering the United States and Britain for years.
But the BJP won that year’s Gujarat elections in a landslide. Modi appointed Shah to the state’s powerful interior ministry.
Murder and exile
The following year was the start of a political storm that threatened to cut short Shah’s career.
Haren Pandya, one of Shah’s predecessors at the home ministry and an outspoken critic of Modi’s conduct during the 2002 riots, was shot dead during a morning walk in Ahmedabad.
The case was never officially solved but suspicion fell on gangsters Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati — both of whom were later killed by police in murky circumstances.
Critics claimed, but never proved, that Shah had ordered police to murder the pair.
Shah denied the allegations, saying they were concocted by political rivals to discredit him.
