For 40 years, Amit Shah has been at Narendra Modi\u2019s side \u2013 his confidant, consigliere and enforcer. Today he is India\u2019s second-most powerful man, and he is reshaping the country in radical ways<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n