Amitabh Bachchan's Brief Foray into Politics and His Fallout with the Gandhi Family

Amitabh Bachchan’s family was once extremely close to India’s leading political family, the Gandhis. So much so that his late mother Teji Bachchan taught Hindi to Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi, the granddaughter of her friend and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Amitabh even entered politics for a brief time , reportedly on the insistence of her son and former PM Rajiv Gandhi, fighting elections on a Congress ticket. “Amitabh Bachchan was almost press gagged into coming into politics. Don’t forget, at that point, he was a big star in 1984, when Indira died. After that was the first election, where Rajiv Gandhi tried to get a big star to defeat veteran leader Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, who was a big political star,” said Tavleen Singh, political reporter and author, in a recent interview with Mojo Story. After Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi got their close family friend Amitabh Bachchan to contest the Lok Sabha elections immediately after. Bachchan paused his acting career at its peak, and defeated HN Bahuguna by a huge margin in the constituency of the former’s hometown Allahabad (now Prayagraj) in UP. Tavleen, who interviewed Amitabh right after he won the election, said the actor told her, “I had no idea that there was this kind of poverty!” She said he was “shocked by the state of the country”. Amitabh quit his political career soon after in 1987, but Tavleen believes that it had more to do with his fallout with the Gandhi family. “From what I’ve gleaned, when the Gandhi family tried to pin the Bofors bribe-taking on the Bachchans, he was very upset because his father was very upset. He couldn’t look himself in the mirror anymore. He could’ve won again but he just decided it’s not for him,” claimed Tavleen, referring to the infamous Bofors scandal in the 1980s. Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors allegedly paid bribes worth Rs 64 crore to top Indian politicians in order to secure the bid to supply more than 400 units of 155 mm FH-77B field howitzers for the Indian Army. Those implicated in the scandal included then-PM Rajiv Gandhi and his family friend and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi among others. “I think that was the real reason for the falling out because Rajiv didn’t defend him and didn’t try to disabuse the rumours because he was worried about his wife’s family, and Quattrocchi getting the blame,” claimed the reporter. Quattrocchi was then a close family friend of Rajiv’s wife Sonia Gandhi , who was born in Italy. Also Read — 51 doctors, 1,800 engineers: Madhavan salutes Suriya’s Agaram Foundation milestone While Amitabh quit politics in the late 1980s, even referring to it as a “cesspool”, his name was cleared in the Bofors scandal only over 20 years later in 2012, when the Swedish chief investigator stated that the allegations against Amitabh and his family were planted by Indian investigators. Amitabh’s wife and fellow veteran actor Jaya Bachchan continues to serve as a Rajya Sabha MP.