Romance of Bollywood stars, politics plays out on yet another election stage

Film stars of post 2014 are becoming politically inclined and prepared to take a stand. At another level, it is a telling commentary on the inability of political parties to find credible leaders as candidates.

The relationship between Bollywood stars and politics is an abiding one. Film stars from across the country have joined politics, won elections and held important posts. At the Centre, Shatrughan Sinha, Sunil Dutt, Vinod Khanna and Smirti Irani went on to become Union ministers. Kirron Kher and Paresh Rawal joined the BJP to enter the Lok Sabha while Raj Babbar, at one point, headed the Uttar Pradesh Congress unit. Amitabh Bachchan was a Congress MP in 1984-86 and an aide of Rajiv Gandhi. Rajesh Khanna, Govinda, Jaya Bachchan, Jaya Prada, Dharmendra, Hema Malini have played a role in central politics — with varying effects.

Kangana Ranaut is the latest edition in Bollywood stars’ zeal to enter an electoral fray. The BJP nominee from Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, has already rattled a section of Bollywood bigwigs who see her emergence as a political force a threat to their business and other interests. Govinda and Shatrughan Sinha have changed their political loyalties while Kher is struggling to retain her candidature from Chandigarh Lok Sabha. Actor Arun Govil, who played the role of Rama in 1980s epic tele serial Ramayana, is in the fray from the Meerut Lok Sabha seat as a BJP nominee. He is campaigning in the full costume of the tele serial even now! Way back in 1988, Govil in Rama get-up had campaigned for the Congress and unsuccessfully tried to influence the voters in Allahabad in a battle between graft crusader V P Singh and Congress nominee Sunil Shastri.

A cursory look at the film-politics nexus tells us many stories and trends. Film stars of post 2014 are becoming politically inclined and prepared to take a stand. This is evident in the way some of the film personalities have turned vocal supporters of Prime Minister Modi, lending their voice to the ongoing ideological debates about nationalism, religion and dissent.

At another level, it is a telling commentary on the inability of political parties to find credible leaders as candidates. The BJP, Trinamul, Shiv Sena and the Congress are relying on reel life heroes to further their cause while the actors’ quest for longevity and relevance in public life is driving them towards electoral politics. In other words, in an otherwise heterogeneous society like India, where ethnicity, class, caste, religion and language all have the potential to create a divide, cinema serves as a unifying and popular factor. Often, film stars provide a more consensual and likable alternative to the average politician and carry an aura around them that is awe-inspiring and fosters admiration. 

However, the quest for longevity in public life or transformation from reel to real life has not been a successful mantra for most Bollywood stars. Dharmendra and his son Sunny Deol won with big margins but failed to repeat it. Amitabh left politics in a huff in 1986 at the height of Bofors payoff charges. Amitabh’s exit turned out to be an important factor that led to Rajiv’s downfall in spite of winning a record 415 Lok Sabha seats in 1984.  

That estrangement symbolised Rajiv’s downfall as V P Singh, who had formed the Janata Dal, won the 1988 Lok Sabha by-election from Allahabad, the seat Amitabh had resigned. The victory prompted the fragmented Opposition to unite and subsequently humble the Congress in the General Election the following year. Rajiv Gandhi felt cheated, though neither he nor Amitabh uttered a word about their rift in public.

When the 1977 General Elections were announced, high-profile lawyer Ram Jethmalani, a strong critic of Indira Gandhi, urged actor Dev Anand to join the Janata Party and participate in its campaign against Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. Caught in a dilemma, Dev apparently paced in his garden all night, lost in thought. By the next morning, he had made up his mind — he would share the dais with Morarji Desai and Jayaprakash Narayan, whom he admired deeply, and make a short speech condemning Indira. The Janata Party experiment, however, soon disillusioned him. He went on to form his own party, the National Party of India (NPI).

"If MGR could spell magic in Tamil Nadu, why not me in the whole country," he told his supporters, among whom was Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

But the party, with Dev Anand as its president, soon shut shop. As he later said in Bombay sometime in early 1981 and reproduced in his memoirs, “The inertia already visible amongst the early enthusiasts dampened my spirits… And that was the end of [the] National Party. It was a great idea that was nipped in the bud.”

Another star who is being taken seriously as a politician — currently fighting Lok Sabha elections from Asansol, Bengal — is Shatrughan Sinha. 'Bihari Babu' formally entered politics when joined the BJP in 1991, but 15 years before that he had been a part of the mass movement launched by Jaya Prakash Narayan against the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. Sinha was the first Bollywood actor to enter politics by formally joining the Opposition party and he wields political clout even now, despite not being in a national party like the BJP or the Congress.

The first star-politician couple of Bollywood was perhaps the Dutts — Nargis and Sunil. The former was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the latter, of the Lok Sabha and a minister. In 1984, three years after Nargis's death, Rajiv Gandhi asked Sunil Dutt to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Bombay on a Congress ticket. The Dutt house was in a state of turmoil, caught between wedding preparations as daughter Namrata was marrying actor Kumar Gaurav, and election campaigning. The Dutts' son Sanjay, also a prominent actor, was undergoing treatment for drug addiction in the United States. “For most of the wedding preparations, my father-in-law was not around,” recalls Kumar Gaurav. Sunil Dutt won the election by a high margin.

He is remembered as much for the roles he played on the screen as for his campaigns for peace and communal harmony, against drug abuse and for better care for cancer and HIV/AIDS patients. He was the Union Minister for Sports and Youth Affairs and MP from Mumbai North-West at the time of his death. No other film star ever earned the kind of respect from people in India that Sunil Dutt commanded during his two-decade-long political career.

In fact, his entry into politics was, in a way, a logical extension of social works that he had started in the aftermath of the Chinese aggression under the banner of Ajanta Arts Welfare Troupe. Sunil and Nargis organised entertainment shows of film stars and playback singers for the army men on the borders during the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars. They were also active in running a school for spastic children. Their passion for social work had endeared the couple to Indira Gandhi with whom they stood loyally even during the Emergency and thereafter.  

The link between cinema and politics in the South is deeper, with the lines often merging. The Mumbai film industry’s stars, barring a few exceptions, have had a shallower relationship with politics. If in the South, stars have formed parties and governments, Bollywood actors have mostly worked on the margins. But they have shone, usually on the roads while campaigning.

April 2024 marks the seventh death anniversary of debonair actor turned politician Vinod Khanna who had money, looks, glamour and fame but the 'sexy sanyasi' largely remained restless till he joined politics. The actor’s entry into politics was dramatic. By his own admission, the day Vinod Khanna joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in December 1997, he was asked to contest from Gurdaspur, in Punjab, for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in February 1998. Khanna had been taken aback. “I didn't even know where Gurdaspur was!” he later told an interviewer. “But I put my heart and soul into my constituency.”

Khanna remained low-key in the political arena although he, along with Shatrughan Sinha, became the first set of Bollywood stars to become ministers in the central government. In July 2002, Atal Bihari Vajpayee made Khanna Union minister of state for culture and tourism. The actor later served a stint in the ministry of external affairs as a junior minister. Khanna remained active in the Film and Television Institute (FTII) for four years between October 2001 and March 2005. The UPA government under Manmohan Singh acknowledged Khanna’s contribution and permitted him to continue as head of the general council of the FTII, a year after the BJP-led NDA was voted out in the 2004 elections.

(The writer is a senior journalist)