Amit Anil Chandra Shah (born 22 October 1964) is an Indian politician currently serving as the Minister of Home Affairs since 2019 and the first Minister of Co-operation of India since 2021. He served as the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 to 2020. He has also served as chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) since 2014. He was elected to the lower house of Parliament, Lok Sabha, in the 2019 Indian general elections from Gandhinagar. Earlier, he had been elected as a member of the upper house of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, from Gujarat in 2017. A chief strategist of the BJP, he is a close aide to Narendra Modi. During his college days, Shah was a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). At the age of 18, he secured a position in the ABVP and joined the BJP in 1987. Shah was first elected in Gujarat as the MLA for a seat partly covering Ahmedabad, Sarkhej in 1997 (a by-election). He continued to hold it in the 1998, 2002 and 2007 elections until the seat's dissolution in 2008; he then got elected from the nearby Naranpura in 2012. As a close associate of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, he held executive portfolios in the Gujarat state government. 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 NDA won 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 the elections of many states since 2014. In his initial two years, the BJP achieved success in Legislative Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Assam but lost ground in Delhi and the large eastern state of Bihar in 2015. In 2017, he was partly credited with the party victories in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Manipur, but the Akali-BJP alliance lost power in the larger Punjab election. In 2018, the party lost power in the states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. A year later, the BJP won 303 seats to get a majority in the 2019 Indian general election under Shah's leadership. Early life Amit Anil Chandra Shah was born in Mumbai on