'He likes scaring people': how Modi's right-hand man, Amit Shah, runs India

Late one night in November 2005, a small group of plain-clothed police officers pulled over a bus in western India. They escorted off a man named Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was joined on the side of the road by his wife, Kausar. Sheikh and Kausar were put into separate police cars and driven 600 miles away, across state lines, into Gujarat. They would never see each other again.

Sheikh had not been charged with anything. The Gujarat police did not have any legal grounds to detain him, let alone his wife. Upon reaching Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s most populous city, Sheikh and Kausar were not taken to a police station. They were instead detained in separate bungalows in a residential neighbourhood. Two days later, on 26 November, Sheikh was driven to a highway intersection in south Ahmedabad and shot dead. Police claimed that Sheikh was a member of an Islamist terrorist group and had been shot while trying to escape. Four days after Sheikh’s death, on 29 November, Kausar was killed. Policemen allegedly poisoned her, then carried her body to the Narmada River, where they burned it and dumped the remains in the water.

According to records later obtained by central government investigators, the officers allegedly involved made several phone calls around the time of each killing. On the other end of the line, each time, was a senior Gujarati politician who ran the state’s home ministry, which put him in charge of the police. His name was Amit Shah.

These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings. The CBI charged Shah with kidnapping, extortion and murder. It alleged that the officers who killed Sheikh and his wife were working on Shah’s orders. (The CBI also confirmed that Sheikh was a gangster who had collaborated with Gujarat police for several years. He had, it seemed, outlived his usefulness.)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/amit-shah-narendra-modi-right-hand-man-india