Syed Shahnawaz Hussain

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Syed Shahnawaz Hussain is a former Indian federal minister and a politician of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Born in Bihar in 1968, he studied for diploma in engineering at Patna and Delhi. He was elected to Lok Sabha in 1999 and was appointed Minister of State for food processing industries, youth affairs and sports, human resource development and civil aviation. He was given independent charge of Ministry of Coal in 2001. He is one of a small group of prominent Muslim leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party. He is a married to a Hindu woman whom he met during the college days in Delhi. While in Delhi, he organized rickshaw-pullers and fought for the rights of the poor hailing from his home state of Bihar. He candidly voiced against the poor and poverty-stricken image of those hailing from Bihar and blames fellow native and strongman Laloo Prasad Yadav for projecting the poor image.

He is a liberal Muslim with insufficient following among Muslinms and he has lost several elections, but re-entered the Lok Sabha in November 2006 in a bye-election when he won the vacant seat of Bhagalpur in Bihar. Shahnawaz is a well recognized figure in a party despite being a Muslim in a party with a Hindu base.