Amit Shah

Amit Shah is India's Union Home Minister, in office since the second Modi government took charge in 2019, and a former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He appears in this record for three reasons: the Home Ministry's role in the 1984 cases, his public use of 1984 against the Congress, and the October 2024 Canadian allegation that tied him to a campaign against Sikh separatists in Canada, which India rejects. He is a living person. Each claim below is attributed, and no allegation is presented as proven.

Career. Born in Mumbai in 1964, Shah became a Gujarat MLA and the state's home minister, and in 2014 the BJP's youngest president, at 49. He has represented Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha since 2019 (PTI profile).

Key moments

• July 2010: arrested by the CBI in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, over alleged fake encounter killings in Gujarat in 2005 and 2006, when he was the state's home minister. The Gujarat High Court gave him bail that October. A special CBI court discharged him in December 2014.
• 21 December 2018: the special court in Mumbai acquits all 22 remaining accused in the case. The judge says the prosecution failed to prove any politician-police nexus and calls the CBI's theory “pre-conceived and premeditated”.
• 5 May 2019: at a rally in Pathankot, Punjab, Shah says the BJP will not spare those responsible for the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, that “nobody was punished” until the Modi government, and cites Sajjan Kumar's imprisonment.
• 2019: under a Home Ministry notification, the SIT on 1984 (set up in February 2015) takes up discharged cases. In September 2019 it reopens seven cases.
• 14 October 2024: RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme says Canadian police have learned a significant amount about criminal activity orchestrated by Indian government agents. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the evidence includes covert information gathering, coercion of South Asian Canadians and more than a dozen threatening or violent acts, including murder. Canada expels six Indian diplomats and India expels six Canadian diplomats.
• October 2024: The Washington Post reports that Canadian officials allege Shah was behind a campaign of threats and intimidation against Sikh separatists in Canada.
• 29 October 2024: Canadian Deputy Foreign Minister David Morrison tells a parliamentary committee how he handled the Post's question: “The journalist called me and asked me if it was that person. I confirmed it was that person.” He gives no evidence and does not say how Canada learned of Shah's alleged involvement. National security adviser Nathalie Drouin tells the committee that Canada has evidence the Indian government gathered information on Sikhs in Canada through diplomatic channels and proxies and passed it to Delhi.
• 1 and 2 November 2024: India summons a Canadian High Commission representative, and its Ministry of External Affairs calls the references to Shah “absurd and baseless”, accusing senior Canadian officials of deliberately leaking “unfounded insinuations”. It warns of serious consequences for relations.
• Later in November 2024: Drouin says Canada is not aware of evidence linking Prime Minister Modi, Foreign Minister Jaishankar or National Security Adviser Doval to criminal activity in Canada, and calls any suggestion to the contrary “speculative and inaccurate”. Her statement does not mention Shah.

Where the record stands. No court has examined the allegation about Shah, and the reports opened here show no evidence about him made public. A Canadian minister confirmed a name to a newspaper; India says the claim is baseless. In Punjab politics Shah has used 1984 as an argument against the Congress, while the SIT that is still reviewing 1984 cases was set up by the Home Ministry he heads.