When Amitabh Bachchan banned the media for boycotting him, refused to meet reporters

Amitabh Bachchan is one of the biggest names in the history of Indian cinema, if not the biggest. It is hard to imagine him being ‘banned’ from getting media coverage. But that is something the superstar faced at the peak of his stardom.

During the Emergency in 1975, a section of film media boycotted Amitabh Bachchan for his perceived role in the press censorship put in place at that time. In an old undated video, Amitabh talks about how in turn, he banned them from the sets of his films for several years as “I did not need to say anything apart from what I was saying on screen.”

In a throwback video, Amitabh recounts how the ban on him came to be. “Whenever anyone enters the public life, the media and the press are after him, which is ok. In 1975, when Emergency was declared in the country, film journalists wrongly thought that the press censorship that came with the Emergency was my doing. They said, ‘This man is close to Indira Gandhi and he is involved in the press censorship and that is why we need to ban Amitabh Bachchan’. They stopped writing about me and printing my pictures. In fact, if I was in a film and they were to mention the star cast, they would put a comma instead of my name,” he said.

The actor then went on to add that in response, he banned media from entering his film sets and refused to give any interviews for years. He recalled, “I felt that if the press has the freedom to ban me then I should have the freedom to ban them too. That is the reason that whenever I was shooting or reporters wanted to meet me, I refused. This continued for some 15 years.”

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As per Amitabh, this ban was lifted after he entered politics as there, he needed the media to reach out to the public. Amitabh contested and won the Lok Sabha election from Allahabad in 1984 and served three years as a Member of Parliament. He eventually resigned in 1987.