Amit Shah to become BJP president this week?

Amit Shah, a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, may be named the next BJP president by the end of this week, a party leader said Thursday.

Shah, who has been credited with the Bharatiya Janata Party's impressive performance in the Lok Sabha polls in Uttar Pradesh, will be stepping into the shoes of party leaders like Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.

Since Rajnath Singh took over as home minister, the party has to appoint a new president.

However, even a month after the council of ministers took charge, the BJP has not announced its new president.

"The government was just formed and there was a lot of work to do... so the selection of the party president was out for a while," said a party leader.

With assembly elections due in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand, the party leader said Shah has emerged as the frontrunner vis-a-vis colleagues such as J.P. Nadda and Om Prakash Mathur.

Shah played a key role in the party's landslide victory in the Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh where it won 71 of the 80 seats.

Known to be a sharp political strategist, the former Gujarat home minister remains Modi's most trusted political aide and master strategist.

Shah, who has a plastics and printing business, met Modi in the late 1980s.

Currently BJP's national general secretary, it was earlier said that Shah may contest from the Vadodara Lok Sabha constituency.

He was accused of involvement in the killing of college student Ishrat Jahan and others in an allegedly staged shootout in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in 2004. However, he got a clean chit in the case.