The Pulitzer Center provided funding for the following hatchet job on Amit Shah by some nutter who used to write for the Caravan. Back in 2017, a Judge in company of other judges, died of a heart-attack. The Caravan alleged that those judges had killed the fellow because he refused to take a bribe to give a favorable verdict in a case involving Amit Shah. This was a ridiculous allegation. Why not suggest that Justice Loya was also anally raped and subjected to casteist insults before being killed by his fellow Judges? Also, how is it that the Doctors who examined Loya were not accused of necrophilia? Is Atul Dev homophobic? If he can allege murder, why not sodomy? If you want to scare the reading public you need to add extra spicy details- e.g. the crematorium staff, on instructions from Amit Shah, extracted the eyes of the corpse and vigorously skull fucked the long suffering Dalit Muslim Judge who had always been a devoted disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Pol Pot and the Marquis de Sade. Worse yet, videos of this vigorous skull-fucking were shown on the State run TV channel. The Government's message was clear- if you refuse a bribe you will be skull fucked by mortuary attendants. Mind it!
Dev's headline is- ‘He likes scaring people’: how Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, runs India
Shah rose in Gujarati politics thanks to his ability to run Cooperative Banks and other such ventures in a clean and transparent way. He is now the Home Minister of India. He runs his Ministry efficiently while also playing a big role in the management of his Party. Efficiency is not compatible with 'scaring people'. Atul Dev is in the business of scaring people by pretending that India is run by a Gestapo.
For 40 years, Amit Shah has been at Narendra Modi’s side – his confidant, consigliere and enforcer.
So Shah wasn't Gujarat Home Minister at the time of the post-Godhra riots. It was only after the 2002 elections, in which the Gujarati voters showed they didn't believe the lies being told about Modi, that Shah joined Modi's Cabinet. He held several portfolios and was highly effective. Far from being a bully, his trademark is to get people to work together without fear of intrigue.
Today he is India’s second-most powerful man, and he is reshaping the country in radical ways
India's most powerful man is Rahul Gandhi. But for him Congress would not have become unelectable. It is he who has ensured that after a long period of coalition governments, India has had a stable government with a simple majority for the last ten years.
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.
The allegation is that the police killed them. Extra-judicial killings on an industrial scale have been a feature of Indian politics since the Naxal threat in the late Sixties. The plain fact is, Gujarat was targeted for terrorist attacks but Shah put a lid on the thing. That is why he is popular. America, which is where Atul lives, killed 1.3 million Muslims and displaced tens of millions more in its war of revenge against Islam. Atul was cool with that. White people have the right to enter the countries and the houses of Muslims and slaughter them. This is Atul's creed. The Pulitzer Center pays him for pointing the finger at India as the true site of Islamophobia. But who is fooled by Atul? Not Pakistanis. They know their former PM, Imran Khan, who protested against America's slaughter of Pakistanis in 2013, was toppled and placed under arrest at the behest of the Americans. Still, perhaps Guardian readers are more gullible. After all, the UK is suffering greatly under a cruel Hindu Prime Minister.
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.
These are allegations made by highly untrustworthy people. When the Dynasty returned to power at the Center in 2004, it used central agencies and tainted officers to fabricate evidence against its political enemies. What it couldn't do was disguise its own corruption and incompetence from the voting public. Still, had Rahul not been gun-shy (he didn't want to meet the same fate as his father and grandmother) this Fascist dynasty would have retained its grip on power by using tactics patented by Indira Gandhi. Who can forget her Home Minister, Buta Singh, putting the boot into the Gandhi Peace Foundation? It was alleged that they were CIA spies! What the Dynasty did to Assam, Punjab and Kashmir is too well known to be worth repeating. The BJP is determined that India should not return to that bloody path. Why? The BJP is not dynastic. Its people want good governance so that their families can rise through enterprise and education not feudal terror tactics.
According to records later obtained by central government investigators,
on orders to frame Shah
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.
Though those same people would just as happily say it was Ronald Reagan if that is what they were paid to say.
These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings.
On orders from the Dynasty. Sadly, the Bench is independent and threw out these fabricated cases.
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.)
They would have sworn up and down that it was on the orders of Ronald Reagan, or Donald Duck, if that was what had been required of them.
The CBI found that Shah had exchanged five calls with the superintendent officer at the scene on the day of the abduction.
Moreover, he and Moshe Dayan had threatened to send Donald Duck to rape the Superintendent if he did not go along with their vile plan.
Over the next few days, they spoke regularly.
Donald Duck frequently sodomized the poor fellow while Amit Shah and Ronald Reagan took turns taunting him.
On the day Sheikh was killed, Shah spoke to the officer five times. The next call they exchanged was on the day of Kausar’s killing. (Shah did not deny making these calls, but later stated that they concerned another case.)
The fact that Shah made telephone calls proves that Donald Duck was raping trillions of bahishkrit Muslim police officers. Moshe Dayan would frequently call them and taunt them. Pulitzer Center should fund more research into this case.
When a warrant was issued against Shah, in July 2010, he eluded arrest for four days, before surfacing in a press conference to deny any wrongdoing. He told the press that he was the victim of a political witch-hunt, orchestrated by the central government, which was then run by the Indian National Congress party, the main opposition to Shah’s own party, the BJP. “The chargesheet had already been made at the behest of the Congress. It is fabricated and had nothing to do with my summons,” Shah said. “I am not afraid of anyone. We will fight the legal battle, and expose those who have tried to wrong us in court.” Shah spent three months in jail and was then released on bail. To prevent any attempts to influence witnesses or judges, it was a condition of Shah’s bail that he stay out of Gujarat until the end of the trial.
The Dynasty thus signed its own death warrant. By going after Gujarat, the Gujaratis gained an incentive to take over the Center.
Banished from his own state, journalists informally referred to Shah as tadipaar, the fugitive. Witness transcripts recorded by the CBI, which included claims that Shah had been running an extortion racket through the state police, were published in national newspapers. But four years later, in December 2014, all the charges against him were dropped. Echoing Shah’s defence, the judge stated that the whole case against him had been “politically motivated”. After years of work on the case, the CBI didn’t challenge the court’s decision.
All the other fabricated cases against BJP leaders collapsed. In some cases, senior officers who had given false testimony face legal consequences.
Earlier that year, national elections had taken place and the agency was reporting to a new government in Delhi, headed by the former chief minister of Gujarat, at whose elbow Shah has spent his entire adult life: Narendra Modi. Shah and Modi first met as lowly foot soldiers of the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, in the 1980s. Over the past 40 years, they have made a great journey, together, from the foothills of Indian politics to its very peak. During this time, Shah has played the roles of Modi’s confidant, consigliere, enforcer.
They were close but Shah wasn't Modi's first Home Minister. The fact is, Shah had a good reputation in Gujarat for organizing and managing things like cooperative banks and other such ventures. He wasn't seen as a 'consigliere' or an enforcer. After Godhra, Vajpayee's Government had helped Modi by sending in a super-cop to clean house. But there were still plenty of corrupt SHOs hand in glove with the landsharks and bootleggers and terrorists. This is like the film 'Raees' starring Shahrukh Khan. That concerned a bootlegger who was used by a Congress Minister to bring in explosives from Pakistan to stage a terrorist incident in Surat. Ultimately, 'Raees'', who fell out with Dawood in Karachi and returned to India, was the victim of an encounter killing- perhaps by cops who had been on his payroll. Shah gets a lot of credit for cleaning up Gujarat and breaking the nexus between the criminal, the terrorist and the Congress politician.
It is impossible to chart the course of one’s life without the other.
Shah rose because of his efficiency and good personality and character. Modi had some extra quality as a leader and communicator. Shah, who is a family man, may not have Modi's ambition. Still coming to the Center was itself the most effective exoneration of the vile and wholly fabricated charges against him. The Dynasty made a mistake in targeting Modi and Shah. What goes around comes around. Still, there can be no doubt that the BJP is the biggest beneficiary from Rahul's remaining on the political stage. But even Modi can't stop the Bench handing down a sentence upon the moon-calf in accordance with the law.
Today, Amit Shah isn’t home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city’s police force, and oversees the Indian state’s intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. With the BJP poised to win the current general election, he is all but certain to remain so for at least the next five years. For Modi, he is what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were for George W Bush – the muscle as well as the brain – rolled into one. Over the past decade, he has been the key architect in remaking India according to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology.
Nonsense! Bush needed a Cheney. Modi does not. He has always been able to get efficient and talented people to work for him. They know they won't be made a scapegoat. They can concentrate on doing their job without worrying about Palace intrigue.
A defining feature of life in India today is the suffocating atmosphere of menace and threat to critics of the government.
Fuck off. The defining feature of life in India is poverty. Critics of the government are welcome to stage protests because they usually backfire. The problem with saying 'the regime is Fascist!' is that people start thinking about the alternative. So long as it is the moon-calf, Modi is safe.
Shah is the face and embodiment of this fear, which lurks everywhere, from the newsrooms to the courtrooms, and which inspires a sense of alarm that is bigger than the sum of the facts and anecdotes that can be amassed to illustrate it. Suspended in the margins between what is known and what can be said, no individual story is more illustrative of contemporary India than that of Amit Shah.
The allegation was that Shah got gangsters killed by the police. The Courts rejected these allegations. The Caravan magazine tried to make out that Shah had got some Judges to kill a fellow Judge. The Courts rejected this bizarre view. For Atul, this is what is truly frightening about Shah. When his Critics say 'on his instructions, Donald Duck repeatedly raped Mahatma Gandhi', people pay no attention. Why? It is because Shah is using evil mind rays to paralyze everybody with fear. It is bad enough that the voter pretends not to believe that Ministers tell policemen to kill gangsters. But, surely, people can't be so shameless as to pretend not to believe that it is absolutely de rigueur for Judges to kill a brother Judge just because he refused a bribe for ten trillion dollars from Amit Shah?
Amit Shah takes care of the details. He has the vast apparatus of the state at his disposal;
Judges often check their text messages to see if Shah wants them to kill one or two of their fellows
an army of party workers await his orders amid the constant cycle of local, regional and national elections; he is a shrewd operator, always ready to weaken the opposition by forging new alliances and luring candidates away from other parties;
like Kharge, Mamta, Stalin etc.
he keeps tabs on the gossip. Last year, a corporate lobbyist in Delhi told me a story:
after Donald Duck raped her while Ronald Reagan and Moshe Dayan stood by stroking themselve off
a cabinet minister in the Modi government had pocketed a small part of the donation a businessman had made to the party, thinking no one would find out, only to get a call from Shah, who had run into the businessman at the Delhi airport and tallied the figure. Shah apparently told the minister to deposit the rest of the amount in the party fund. I could never confirm this story,
nor the story about Judges killing a brother Judge
but whatever its truth, it captures how Indians view the home minister.
No. It captures how shitty the Pulitzer Center is for funding this sort of 'journalism'
“Shah has something like the Eye of Sauron – he sees all,” said the lobbyist, laughing at the hapless minister.
Sauron isn't hapless. Still, what the lobbyist is actually saying is 'if you pay money to the BJP, you can be sure the money goes to party funds not into the pockets of the intermediary. Please publicize this fact. It will be helpful to the ruling party. You are most welcome to mention my name to any money-bags who wants a favor from the ruling party.'
One of Shah’s key roles is to be the prime minister’s shield.
Modi needs no shield.
Modi has attended only one press conference in India since he became prime minister a decade ago.
Modi has better ways to reach the public
In the summer of 2019, at the new party headquarters in Delhi, he sat with half a dozen leaders of the BJP.
Modi learnt a lot from giving interviews and attending such press conferences when he was rising up. He wants his people to acquire the same skills.
Right next to him was Shah, then the BJP president, who answered every question on his behalf.
Modi gets the eyeballs but he wants to promote his team and get the public to trust them and consider them authoritative.
When one journalist specifically directed a question at Modi – about a BJP leader’s remarks in praise of the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
Sadhavi Pragya. She got elected because the Dynasty had framed her as a 'Hindu terrorist'. But Modi has dropped her this time around.
– Modi deflected by pointing towards Shah. “We are just disciplined soldiers,” he joked. “For us the party president is everything.”
So, this was a morale building exercise for his own people.
Shah batted away the questions for about half an hour in his usual hectoring way. He blamed opposition leaders, feigned offence at criticism, and instructed the reporters to check their facts. The message was clear: Modi didn’t have to bother with pesky journalists; Shah took care of each.
Dev is a journalist. He isn't pesky. He is fucking paranoid and worthy of funding only by the Pulitzer Center.
In TV interviews, Shah sits impatiently and speaks in a terse, streetwise tone, seemingly checking off bullet points prepared in advance. The news anchors thank him for “gracing” their stage and avoid interrupting his monologues. In these managed interactions, Shah appears in command. Partly owing to his days in Gujarat and partly owing to the Indian government’s widely documented use of Israeli spyware to target journalists, activists and critics,
if they have been taking Chinese money, they may go to jail
the image of Shah in the public imagination is that of a man who holds everyone’s secrets. “Modi has a certain charm, which is perhaps the most dangerous thing about him,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy told me. “Amit Shah is a single-string instrument: the only note he can strike is fear.”
Roy doesn't know either Modi or Shah. Anyway, she says she seceded from India long ago.
Shah maintains a personal website, which includes a page called the Lighter Side, featuring political cartoons that depict him. In one of these, the finance ministry’s investigative agency is represented as a dog unleashed by Shah, chasing a leader of the opposition. (The finance minister is not in the picture.) “He likes scaring people,” a lawyer in Gujarat, who has known Shah for years, told me. “He likes the image that he has.”
Lawyer was raped by Donald Duck. Then some Judges murdered him. Atul Dev likes scaring us with stories of this sort. Pulitzer Center thinks he is very very brave.
Many of the people I contacted for this story spoke to me on the condition of anonymity or refused to speak altogether.
Atul Dev spoke to Justice Loya's family and then dragged their name through the mud. After all, if the fellow really had been offered a big big bribe he would have been an utter fool not to take it. Still, the part about his being killed by fellow Judges was hilarious.
Retired supreme court judges, former central government ministers and even political journalists told me they had nothing to say about the home minister.
Because Atul would report that they had been raped by Donald Duck on orders from Amit Shah.
One former home minister told me, improbably, that he has no opinion about the home ministry any more. A few who agreed to talk were unwilling to do so by phone. One of the country’s top lawyers laughed at my suggestion of doing an interview over Zoom. When he was done laughing, he said: “No.”
Even if you want to spread canards against Shah, a guy who worked for the Caravan is the last person you should do it through. This is because those cunts make up stupid shit.
Shah himself initially agreed to meet me, I was told by a BJP spokesperson, but then changed his mind without any explanation, and the spokesperson stopped responding. This month, when I sent him a detailed list of questions, the spokesperson said that it would be impossible to find time to comment before the end of India’s elections in June.
Donald Duck agreed to meet me, I was told by a Disney spokesperson, but then changed his mind without any explanation. Was it because I had sent a list of detailed questions about his sodomization of Justice Loya on orders from Moshe Dayan? The Disney spokesperson suggested that Donald Duck was too busy to speak to me but maybe, after I renew my subscription, he would have the time to do so.
“One really has to think about how to talk about Amit Shah,” Roy had said when I first called her.
Nobody gives a shit about Roy.
“The things worth saying cannot really be said, or published.” A few weeks later, halfway through a meeting with a senior member of Shah’s own party, I heard the same thing again: “There are things about Amit Shah that cannot be said.”
If you are truthful, you can't say he ordered Donald Duck to rape you. But Atul isn't truthful. That is why he is funded by the Pulitzer Center and published by the Guardian.
A“gruff man” is how Aakar Patel, former head of Amnesty International in India, remembered Shah, having briefly met him two decades ago in Gujarat.
But Aakar is not revealing details of his own punitive sodomization by Donald Duck carried out on orders of Amit Shah.
Already, there was a brashness about him. A man of considerable girth and lazy posture, Shah dressed in ill-fitting kurtas. He had a bald dome, round face, unruly beard and canny eyes. Now, at the age of 59, the beard is trimmed, the kurtas are tailored and accented with Burberry scarves, and the eyes have settled behind rimless glasses into a fixed, unsettling gaze.
I suppose India's enemies find him 'gruff' and unsettling. That's a good thing.
It was in the flames of the 2002 Gujarat riots that the current era of Indian history was inaugurated. Over the course of three days in Ahmedabad, hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu mobs. Police did little to stop the violence, even as Muslim women were raped and then burned alive. Women’s pregnant bellies were knifed, and Muslim children’s heads were smashed open with rocks. A recently disclosed 2004 inquiry by the UK government held Modi “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that made this carnage possible. He was banned from entering the US or the UK for almost a decade.
On orders from the Dynasty when it came to power in 2004
Modi has always denied any responsibility for the violence. Yet in a recent speech in Gujarat, Shah, his closest political ally, proudly told the crowd: “Modisaheb taught them [India’s Muslims] a lesson, and no one has rioted since.”
More important is the killing of terrorists on Pakistani, perhaps even Canadian, soil. Sadly, the lesson administered by NATO during the war on terror misfired. Take revenge if you have to, but then stop the blood-letting. Don't turn it into an industry which is lucrative for private contractors.
In 2002, immediately after the mob violence, Modi went on a “pride march” around the state, blowing dog whistles with a smile and a wink.
Rahul winks. Modi doesn't.
Shah was Modi’s point-man for that campaign, which rallied the Hindu electorate and paved the way to Modi’s first ever electoral victory in 2002. (Modi was originally appointed, not elected, to the chief minister role.) Shah, by then a member of the Gujarat assembly, was soon named Gujarat’s state minister for home affairs.
He did a great job.
Even after that victory, questions about Modi’s role in the riots did not go away.
Which is why he kept winning by bigger and bigger margins.
Numerous credible sources accused him of having deliberately allowed, or even encouraged, the violence. Among the most significant sources was another BJP leader, Haren Pandya, a former cabinet colleague of Modi and his political rival in the party, who repeated these allegations to the press and in sworn testimony. In March 2003, Pandya was found in his car with five bullets in his body. The case remains unsolved,
No. The Supreme Court sentenced 12 people for the murder in 2019.
but Pandya’s story has come to be seen in allegorical terms. Last year, a senior leader of the BJP wrote on X that he was worried that Modi and Shah might “do a Haren Pandya on me”.
Pandya's career was already over. He had resigned as Minister of Revenue (probably because he was corrupt) and was resigned to not getting a ticket in the Dec. 2002 elections. Should he have been provided police protection? No. He had stolen money and paid the price. His wife later tried to make out there was a conspiracy but nobody believed her.
Subramanian Swamy, the maverick BJP leader
He got a Rajya Sabha ticket from the BJP. But he has been dropped. He's a little too crazy.
who posted that tweet, belongs to a generation of Hindu nationalists that has been shelved by Modi and Shah.
Swamy was admired by the RSS for his courage during the Emergency. But, he hated Vajpayee whom he accused of being a wine drinker and meat eater.
Swamy told me that he meant to say Shah might kick him out of the party, “as he did with Haren Pandya”. This was because, Swamy explained, Modi and Shah are deeply insecure people who want to limit the influence of leaders
Swamy can't get elected dog-catcher. He has no fucking influence.
who have their own electoral base and political stature. “It has become a one-man show,” Swamy said. In Swamy’s view, Shah is the stage manager of this show. “Amit Shah helps Modi run the party like a machine, much like in the Soviet Union,” Swamy said.
Swamy can't run shit.
In Gujarat, before his arrest and banishment in 2010, Shah effectively ran the state for Modi; he held 12 different portfolios in the state cabinet, and his influence on the state machinery outweighed all those titles. In 2012, he was allowed to return when the supreme court transferred the criminal case against him, relating to the death of Sheikh and his wife, from Gujarat to Mumbai, 500km away. It also instructed the lower court to ensure the case was seen through from beginning to end by a single judge. Yet after Modi became the prime minister, in 2014, the first judge who was hearing the Sheikh case was transferred out, shortly after having asked Shah to appear in court. Six months later, in December, the second judge, Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, unexpectedly died of a heart attack – the facts surrounding his death have been disputed – while attending a wedding.
Atul's colleague at the Caravan interviewed distraught family members and came up with the bizarre theory that he had been murdered by fellow Judges with whom he was staying in a State guest house so as to attend the wedding of the daughter of a colleague. Niranjan Takle says that Loya's sister said Shah had offered ten million pounds to her brother. However, Loya's sister's cat told me that Shah offered it ten billion pounds to say miaow to her. Cat courageously refused this bribe. Only for this reason cat has been hounded out of India and is currently seeking funding from Pulitzer Center to conduct proper journalistic investigation of this heinous injustice.
The third judge to be appointed to the case dismissed the charges against Shah within three weeks of taking charge.
But only after, as the cat revealed, the judge was sodomized repeatedly by Donald Duck. A Disney spokesperson I spoke to refused to confirm this but suggested that Duck Sahib might be willing to grant me an interview after I renewed my subscription.
In 2014, Modi made Shah the president of the BJP. At the time, Shah was still charged with murder, but the party lined up behind him obediently. He repaid their faith. Over the next five years, the party’s membership, which stood at 35 million when Shah took over as president, grew almost sixfold to 180 million. In 2018, thanks to Shah, the party was governing 21 out of India’s 28 states.
This is why he has plenty of time to arrange the murder of Judges
No one disputes that Shah is an extremely effective political organiser.
But we will if his party does badly. My gut feeling is that seat selection has been poor. Shah is taking the grass-roots for granted. We don't have exit polls so we can't be sure of what is happening with booth management.
Those who have worked with him say he is an obsessive micromanager. He has focused the BJP’s army of party members around the local polling booth, the smallest unit in the vast enterprise that is every Indian election. There are about a million polling stations in India. For each of these where the BJP is running, a small team of organisers identify potential BJP voters and make sure they come out to vote. These organisers report to their supervisor, who reports to a regional supervisor, who in turn reports to Shah, who hones the party’s strategy accordingly. “He is a tireless organiser of the party cadre,” a journalist in Delhi told me. “He is at the party headquarters very late into nights, making sure everyone is working, making sure everyone is fed, his phone is constantly ringing, he is getting updates from all over, laughing, making jokes, gesticulating.”
Rather than scaring people.
Shah’s power is equally undisputed. During Modi’s first term, Shah, as president of the BJP, was not technically part of the government. But the corporate lobbyist in Delhi told me that he had seen “cabinet ministers jump out of their chairs when a call came from him”. Rajiv Shah, a journalist who reported on the early years of Modi and Shah, explained the order of rule in Gujarat, which is a neat reflection of the way Delhi runs today. “No 1 is Modi, and because he is Modi, he has to be all the numbers from one to 10,” he said. “Then 11 to 30 is Amit Shah, and then there are a bunch of people who are told what to do.”
This is an exaggeration. Gadkare and Rajnath are not nonentities. Still, there can be no doubt that the Cabinet is cohesive. There have been some disappointments- e.g. Harsh Vardhan at Health during COVID- but even when people are dropped, the thing is done gracefully.
Unlike Modi, who relishes mythologising his life, Shah has cultivated an aura of total opacity, which makes it hard to establish even the most mundane details of his biography. So little is known about him that opposition leaders have publicly asked if he is even a Hindu. When I put that question to a Gujarati reporter, who has covered the state for over two decades, including all of Shah’s time there, he assured me: “He is a kattar Hindu.” The Hindi word, which literally means “staunch”, also suggests a violent fundamentalism.
But it is Kejriwal who popularized the word 'kattar'.
Here are the bare facts. Shah was born in 1964 to a financially prosperous, upper-caste Gujarati family. His great-grandfather was the nagarseth – a phenomenally rich adviser to the ruling king – in the small princely state of Mansa, an hour’s drive from Ahmedabad. His childhood was spent in a haveli, the family mansion. His father was the president of the Ahmedabad stock exchange, and the family business was in manufacturing pipes out of thermoplastic materials. Shah’s could easily have been a life of dealing stocks or goods, running a business operation of some sort. (Last month, he disclosed to the Election Commission that his stock holdings in 180 companies are worth more than $2m.)
In 2016, Shah told the journalist Patrick French
an actual journalist, not a nutter who wrote for the Caravan
that he was “not keen on formal studies” and spent his time as an adolescent at the local shakha (school) of the RSS, the Hindu nationalist organisation whose political wing is the BJP. When Shah was a teenager, his family moved to Ahmedabad, then Gujarat’s capital. There, he met Modi, who was twice his age. “I was 16 or 17 years old at that time,” he told French. “Modi was in charge of three RSS districts in Gujarat, including the city of Ahmedabad. He had trained thousands of workers.” When asked to say more, Shah wrapped the subject up: “I am not going to speak about my personal relationship with Narendrabhai.”
Why? Shah was the President of the BJP. As such, he had no 'personal relationship' with anybody- even the PM. He had to be dispassionate and maintain discipline. He could not show partiality or sycophancy. A Congress President had said 'Indira is India and India is Indira'. That is not the sort of sentiment the head of a democratic party should express. It may be that Shah is devoted to Modi. It may be that they are close friends. But the President of the Party must put the needs of the Party first. The PM must put the needs of the country first. They are welcome to work closely together but then we would all be better off if we cooperated closely with each other.
Shah may have attended a shakha. There are many people in India today who claim to have attended RSS schools in their childhood – to have basked in the atmosphere of Hindu supremacism is now a source of politically expedient pride. But local reporters in Gujarat recall nothing of this sort from Shah’s early years. There are no pictures of him in the distinctive uniform of the RSS, white shirt and khaki shorts. The RSS forces celibacy on its members,
Nonsense! It is a voluntary choice.
but Shah is a family man: he got married in 1987 and has a son, Jay Shah, who as head of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, has been described as “the most powerful single person in any sport anywhere in the world”.
Shah was closely involved with cricket at an earlier point.
Dhirendra Jha, a Delhi-based journalist who has authored several books about the RSS, told me he believes Shah retrofitted his life story to make himself palatable to the lifelong devotees of the organisation. Shah’s account of his early years is inconsistent. In a book published in 2022 to celebrate Modi’s 20 years in power – 12 in Gujarat and eight in Delhi – Shah claimed to have met Modi in 1987, when he would have been 23, not 17. Even there, he says nothing more about it. The relationship between Modi and Shah, among the most consequential in the history of Indian politics, is clouded in obfuscations and secrecy from the very beginning. Even where there doesn’t seem to be anything worth hiding, there is an insistence on saying nothing. Silence is the only credo.
Nonsense! We understand that Shah came from a business family. He was an RSS man in the sense that he participated in various voluntary initiatives of theirs. Because of his business skills he was good at running things like Cooperative Banks. There was a shake-out in the BJP ranks in 2002. Shah had ability and rose thereafter. But, suppose more trouble had been taken in framing him, he might now be rotting in jail while the Dynasty continued to loot the country.
While in a private college studying biochemistry, in the early 1980s, Shah was already doing work for the family business. His friends included other businessmen such as Gautam Adani, now India’s richest man. A hanger-on with deep pockets, sealed lips and connections in the Gujarati business community, Shah was useful to Modi.
Modi was useful to the RSS which has been very useful to the Hindu and Jain community.
As he climbed the ladder in the BJP, Modi took Shah along. “Modi successfully maintained a clean public image,” a Gujarati politician told a Hindustan Times reporter in 2010, “because he delegated all the dirty work to Shah, who executed it with ruthlessness.”
This is an obvious lie. If Shah had been close to Modi, he would have been inducted into his first Cabinet. Don't forget, Shah was already an MLA. Modi had never stood for elections before being appointed CM. With hindsight, had Shah been H.M, maybe there would have been no Godhra.
Look at the story of Hindu nationalism in modern India, and you start to notice Amit Shah’s fingerprints everywhere.
after which you start to notice that everybody has been sodomized by Donald Duck on orders from Moshe Dayan. That is why they are terrified to speak out about injustice done to Justice Loya's sister's cat which turned down a bribe of ten trillion dollars from Amit Shah.
In the late 1980s, the BJP was rallying around the issue of building a temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, a Hindu deity, which they claimed was at the site of an old mosque in the town of Ayodhya. In support of this cause, LK Advani, then the president of the BJP, went on a two-month journey across central India, making inflammatory speeches wherever he stopped. He rode a Toyota pickup truck outfitted with Hindu iconography to make it look like a Vedic chariot. In the 80-day period covering the journey and its aftermath, the Indian historian KM Panikkar noted, Advani’s political theatre incited 116 riots between Hindus and Muslims across 14 states, in which 564 people died.
In the sub-continent, history shows that when a minority attacks a majority, it gets stomped.
Shah claims to have managed the “campaign to mobilise masses” during Advani’s journey, which culminated two years later, when RSS men demolished the mosque in Ayodhya, sparking a wave of riots throughout the country. In 1991, when Advani contested his seat in the national election from a constituency in Gujarat, Shah was his campaign organiser. In a grainy picture from this time, surrounded by a roomful of people, Advani is seen signing his election nomination sitting next to Modi; Shah is the bearded figure at the edge of the frame, drenched in sweat, leaning over with his fist on the table.
There is a less grainy picture of me with Advani from a few years earlier. I also met Vajpayee who, sadly, did not offer me Vodka or Whiskey despite the fact that Subramaniyam Swamy says he was never without a flask of both. Come to think of it, I also have a picture of me with Prince Charles. This proves that Modi is actually an Englishman named Nicholas Maugham. House of Windsor is seeking to overthrow Dynasty and re-establish British Raj! Pulitzer Center should very kindly fund my research into this.
In the second half of the 20th century, Gujarat, today a Hindu nationalist heartland, slowly turned into a communal tinderbox.
Shah was born in 1964. The first big riots occurred just 5 years later! Connect the fucking dots!
There were large-scale riots targeting the Muslim community in 1969 and 1985. Shah grew up in this era. By the 1990s, the Gujarati historian Achyut Yagnik has noted, it was common for even women and children to be targeted during mob violence.
What was novel was Donald Duck sodomizing all and sundry. Pulitzer Center should fund my subscription to Disney Channel so I can interview Duck Sahib in this connection.
These trends reached their apogee in the violence of 2002.
Because of 9/11, the US had put a nuclear gun to Pakistan's head. They responded with the terror attack on the Indian parliament which led to a big troop build up at the border. Godhra- where Muslims slaughtered Hindu pilgrims- was seen as the ISI's attempts to impede Indian Army logistics so as to weaken them in Rann of Kutch theater. That why the Army was prepared to shoot to kill to end the riots. Modi's genius was to lift curfew early.
Rajiv Shah, the Gujarati journalist, has lived for decades in the Ahmedabad neighbourhood of Sarkhej, Amit Shah’s old constituency in the state parliament. When I met him at his apartment last year, he remembered running into Shah as a young reporter. “When the tensions were still running high, I caught Amit Shah coming out of Modi’s office,” he told me. “I said to him that there is a lot of uneasiness and tension in the community. I asked him if he is thinking about bringing the leaders of the Hindu and the Muslim community together and appeal for peace.”
The leaders of the Muslim community were useless. The thugs mattered but killing them mattered even more. Once they got the message, they ran away.
Amit Shah, in Rajiv’s telling, smiled and asked where he lived. In Sarkhej, Hindu and Muslims were segregated. Upon hearing Rajiv’s street address, Shah told him not to worry. Nothing would happen on his side of the neighbourhood, Shah said. It would be on the other side.
Shah wasn't a Minister. But he knew what was happening on the ground. This anecdote shows why Shah rose and rose. It also shows why attacking Modi and Shah for bein anti-Muslim is counter-productive. The majority has no great desire to be slaughtered by the majority.
The riots left more than 1,000 dead, but the aftermath would leave a further trail of bodies in its wake. The death of Haren Pandya was seen to be a warning shot. (Pandya’s wife has since publicly accused of Modi of involvement in Pandya’s death, which she described as a “political murder”.)
Pandya had been dropped as a Minister and legislator. Perhaps he stole money from the wrong people. Those convicted however are Muslims who say they were seeking revenge. Sadly, it is the majority which can take more effective and lasting vengeance.
In 2005, Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife were killed. Years later, during the trial of Sheikh’s alleged killers – by that point, the charges against Shah had been dropped – a witness testified that Sheikh had himself been involved in Pandya’s assassination, and had allegedly been acting on the instructions of a senior police officer. In 2006, Tulsiram Prajapati, an associate of Sheikh who was on the bus the night that Sheikh and his wife were picked up by the police, was shot dead in police custody. He was the last witness to the police abduction of Sheikh, and had allegedly also been involved in Pandya’s killing. Two years after being indicted in Sheikh’s case, in 2012, Shah was again charged with being “the kingpin of the conspiracy” to carry out the extrajudicial killing of Prajapati. Two years later, BH Loya, the judge presiding over Shah’s case, was found dead under suspicious circumstances.
He had a heart attack while in the company of two brother judges. Still, there can be no doubt that if Muslims kill Pandya in revenge, then it must be the case that actually it was the police who instructed some other gangster to cause those Muslims to kill Pandya in revenge- probably by getting them repeatedly sodomized by Donald Duck. Moreover, the same type of occult sodomization must have killed Loya, because some gangster was killed. This shows that Amit Shah is scaring people very much. Even Duck Sahib is afraid to talk to me unless I renew my Disney subscription.
The precise circumstances around these deaths are murky,
due to Duck Sahib's terror at granting interview
yet it is at least within the bounds of possibility that they are all linked to the riots of 2002. Pandya was speaking publicly about Modi’s allegedly deliberate inaction during the mob violence;
nothing wrong in trying to cross over to Congress if your own party thinks you are a thief.
Sheikh and Prajapati were alleged to have been involved in silencing Pandya; Sheikh’s wife was allegedly killed because she was a witness to Sheikh’s abduction by the police; and Loya was presiding in the court that was to hear the cases involving these killings. It is worth noting that too many details are missing to say anything with certainty, but the government’s consistent obstruction of transparency and oversight in these cases has allowed suspicions to persist.
Why Modi has not demanded extradition of Donald Duck from Joe Biden?
Around the time of his 2010 arrest, other allegations were swirling around Shah and his cronies. There are tapes of his deputies talking about how to sabotage a supreme court-ordered investigation into extrajudicial killings in Modi’s Gujarat. (These were recorded by a government official and leaked to the media.) There are leaked tapes of Shah himself allegedly ordering an officer to put illegal surveillance on a young woman in 2009. (The BJP acknowledged that the woman had been surveilled, but claimed that it had been done at her father’s request, so it was not a violation of her rights.) The body of evidence against Shah was convincing enough for a national magazine to put him on the cover in 2012, behind a headline that asked: “Why is this man still free?”
The answer was obvious. He was innocent of any crime. What is more, he was good at his job and destined to rise and rise. Meanwhile, the shitty liars who tried to frame Modi, Shah, Kodnani, etc. failed miserably. The bigger problem is that it is foolish to attack a Hindu for being anti-Muslim in a Hindu majority country. This is because Hindus know what happened to them in Muslim majority areas.
Twelve years later, it is unimaginable that the Indian press would publish such a headline about a senior BJP politician. “They have been able to get away from their past,” said Amnesty International’s Aakar Patel – he was speaking of Modi and Shah together, as people in India often do – “and the media and the judiciary have helped them do it.”
Very true. Even the so called 'Supreme Court' of the USA has illegally denied my request to be shown tapes of Donald Duck sodomizing Aakar Patel. Media is also refusing to investigate the matter. Pulitzer Center should kindly fund my further research into this conspiracy.
India has never seen a crackdown on media freedom like the one Modi and Shah have engineered.
Just as the globe has never seen a crackdown on media freedom such that even CCTV footage of Donald Duck sodomizing Aakar Patel is not freely available on Pornhub.
Unlike the suspension of press freedoms during Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in 1975-77, this crackdown has been achieved through quiet coercion and precise threats. A striking indication of the media’s timidity in the Modi-Shah era came in 2017, when the Caravan, the magazine where I then worked, published the explosive testimonies of the family of Loya, the second judge to preside over Shah’s trial. The family alleged the judge’s dead body was not handed over to them directly; they pointed out that while the judge supposedly died of a heart attack, his clothes were covered in blood; they claimed that before Loya’s death, senior judges had been pressuring him to discharge Shah, dangling the promise of enormous bribes.
The son of the family withdrew all such crazy allegations.
At first, no news channel or newspaper picked up the story. Finally, a week later, the Indian Express published an article in which two judges of Bombay high court dismissed the claims made by the family. A relatively minor detail in the family’s allegations was that the hospital where the judge was taken for urgent care was “an obscure place”, where even the electrocardiography unit was not working. On its front page the Express published an ECG report supposedly conducted just before the judge’s death – apparent proof that the family was lying. Yet, as social media users quickly pointed out, the date on the image did not match the date of Loya’s death. The newspaper issued a correction on this detail, but nevertheless stood by the story, without any further explanation or reporting. Later, when Shah was asked at a public event about Loya’s death, he gamely responded by saying that people should read the Indian Express, instead of the Caravan.
If Loya was killed, he was killed by fellow Judges. If there was negligence, that negligence was of the fellow Judges. Earlier I had suggested that in the course of sodomizing Loya as punishment for refusing a bribe, the Judges had ruptured several of Loya's internal organs. I now think it was the sudden appearance of Donald Duck which was the cause of death. Why?
Well, suppose yourself an Indian judge. Someone offers you ten million dollars. But you are in a bad mood and say no. Your fellow judges get angry. It is the duty of Indian judge to take bribe from everybody. They are beating and sodomizing you in the usual fashion and maybe you are feeling a little bored or thinking about what sort of pizza to order. Then a Disney character bursts into the room accompanied by ghost of Moshe Dayan. This so startles you that your ticker gives out.
Shah was reaping the rewards of what he had sown. During the first term of the Modi government, it was he who rang up media owners when their coverage of the government veered out of line. Media owners in India are almost entirely businessmen with other, more lucrative businesses to take care of, for which they depend upon the government.
Caravan and Wire and Scroll depend on foreign donors. But, if they are Chinese, they may go to jail.
Journalistic principles are generally reserved for ceremonial addresses at media soirees, not the newsroom. While the television news hyped and hailed everything that Modi did, newspaper editors who offended Modi and Shah were shown the door.
Not really. Goenkas and Birlas and the dynasty that owns the Hindu and the magnates who own TV stations in Opposition States were welcome to badmouth Modi as much as they liked. Saying Modi is anti-Muslim is good for Modi. Saying Shah kicks ass- which is what this article does- is good for Shah.
No better guardians of constitutional protocols were to be found in the supreme court of India. In 2018, several petitioners appealed to the supreme court to order an investigation into the death of Loya. The court refused.
I said at the time that role of Donald Duck should have been mentioned. Unless Donald Duck had appeared why Loya is having heart attack? After all, if you refuse a bribe, your brother Judges are bound to beat and sodomize you. It is something you are inured to. Only the sudden appearance of a Disney character with his cock out could startle you and cause you to suffer a heart attack.
The judgment was written by the current chief justice of India, DY Chandrachud. “Utterly wrong and jurisprudentially incorrect,” was how one retired judge of the Delhi high court described it.
Because Duck Sahib's affidavit was not sought.
Chandrachud, a graduate of Harvard Law School who recently received an Award for Global Leadership from that same institution, had relied on the written statements of four judges who were with Loya the night of his death. They all said that nothing suspicious had taken place, but there were internal contradictions in their own accounts. The contradictions were never cleared up, because these judges never spoke to the media, and never sat through a cross examination of their statements in court. Their written statements were not even recorded on an affidavit, which means they were not made under oath. This was a serious procedural lapse, but Chandrachud felt, he wrote in the judgment, that these statements had “a ring of truth”. In response, one of India’s leading jurists wrote a scathing assessment on his blog. “Nobody can come to a definitive conclusion,” about whether or not the judges were telling the truth, “without going through the processes that the legal system expressly envisages for exactly this purpose.”
But this is also the reason that nobody can come to the definitive conclusion that Donald Duck is not sodomizing ten trillion bahishkrit judges in India every Tuesday night.
When I put to Tushar Mehta, India’s solicitor general and a friend of Shah’s from his Gujarat days, the claim that the supreme court has failed to protect constitutional principles in recent years, he responded via email that such a view was “shocking”. He wrote: “The Indian legal system and the supreme court of India have been upholding the constitutional principles much better than its counterparts in other parts of the world and the grievances of millions of citizens always reach the supreme court and are redressed by the supreme court exceptionally well.”
This shows Tushar Mehta is afraid of Donald Duck- right?
Being a reporter in India is to frequently come upon the limits of what can be known.
but crossing that limit and publishing stupid lies.
Over the past decade, when I was working in Delhi and covering the judiciary, I had several off-the-record meetings with supreme court judges. At first, I thought they wanted to reveal information the public needed to know. But these meetings often veered into three-hour conversations, sometimes spread over dinner. Stepping out of a bungalow in central Delhi late one night, it dawned on me that I was being invited because these judges thought I knew more than them.
Like how to get hold of Duck Sahib to invite him for homosexual orgy.
Beat reporters assured me that that is often why they are called to visit, but I found it deeply unsettling that the judges of the supreme court themselves had no clear understanding of what was going on in the supreme court.
They were and are stupid people doing a boring job in a stupid manner. Being boring shitheads, they are glad of the company even a crazy journalist can provide.
It was in moments like that I realised that the entire institution was floating in the air, anyone’s for the taking.
The truth is, India is a boring place run in a boring manner by stupid people. Modi and Shah are better than any currently available alternative. But they are deeply boring Gujjus. They aint Hitler and Goebbels.
In the course of reporting the story you are reading, I had another of these absurd encounters. I went to see a judge to ask whether Modi’s government influences the judiciary, and if so, how. The judge suggested I read a profile of Mehta, the solicitor general, published in the Caravan. When I told the judge that I had written that story, he did not believe me. He pulled out his phone, checked the byline, looked at me, and said: “Then you should be telling me how it happens!”
In other words, the Caravan makes up salacious stories and then tries to get deeply boring people to confirm them. Judges got interested in the Caravan because it raised their prestige by suggesting they spent their spare time killing each other.
But I do not know myself. You can understand the long history of corruption in the Indian judiciary, the remarkable frequency with which judges who rule in favour of the government seem to land cushy post-retirement jobs.
Which is why the Dynasty was able to wholly subvert the Indian constitution. Fortunately, autocracy is tempered by assassination. Rahul will be shot if he gets his hands on power. Indeed, there will be a long queue of would be assassins outside his door.
But who calls whom, whether a carrot is dangled or a stick, whether people are driven by fear or greed or ideology or all of the above: these are things that remain in the dark, known only to the protagonists, who never talk.
Stupid journalists invent crazy lies and pretend it is news. Meanwhile the guys doing boring stuff make some money or, in the case of Modi, gain a place in the history books.
Such questions do not just surround the case of, say, the death of a judge in 2014. They sit there blankly unanswered about the outcome of the Bhopal disaster of 1984, in which an explosion at a Union Carbide factory exposed 500,000 Indians to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate, for which the judges let the company off with a comparatively small fine; about the culpability of the Congress leadership in the anti-Sikh mob violence that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and left more than 3,000 dead; about the role of Modi in the 2002 riots that left more than 1,000 dead; and on, and on, right up to the present day.
Why don't Judges just invent evidence so as to reach the conclusions this nutter wants?
If institutional frailty is nothing new in India, what distinguishes Modi from those who preceded him is his ruthlessness in imposing his will on this rickety system, and using it to his own end.
What distinguishes Modi is that he doesn't need to impose shit. People want to go in the direction he wants to lead them. That's how democracy is supposed to work.
It happened in Gujarat; now it is happening in Delhi. For more than two decades, Modi has been the face of this manipulation of state power, and all this time, behind the scenes, pulling the levers for his master, has been Shah.
Modi & Shah want to and are able to run the country. Rahul Baba isn't. That's the long and short of it.
Since the start of Modi’s second term in 2019, human rights organisations, thinktanks and international media outlets have begun to worry about India like never before.
They are hysterical ninnies whom everybody ignores. Still, if they get funding from the Pulitzer Center why grudge them their crust of bread?
