“He Is a Snake”: Why Rajiv Gandhi Turned on Amitabh Bachchan
For decades, Amitabh Bachchan and Rajiv Gandhi were held up as proof that power and stardom could share the same drawing room. Their families had known each other since the children were toddlers in Allahabad. Sonia Gandhi stayed with the Bachchans before her wedding. The two men swam at Rashtrapati Bhavan, flew together at Delhi’s flying club, and later sat in the same political circle after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. That closeness is why a single private sentence, recorded years later in a political memoir, still startles people: after a ten-minute meeting, Rajiv Gandhi is said to have remarked of his childhood friend, “He is a snake.”
The line appears in journalist and former MP Santosh Bhartiya’s 2021 book V.P. Singh, Chandrashekhar, Sonia Gandhi Aur Main. It was not a speech or a press statement. According to Bhartiya, Rajiv had already lost office. V.P. Singh was Prime Minister. Rajiv was living at 10 Janpath as Leader of the Opposition. Amitabh came to see him. The visit lasted about ten minutes. After the actor left, Rajiv said the words in the presence of others in the room, including, the book claims, then journalist Rajiv Shukla. The remark was not about a single insult. It was the end of a long unravelling.
A friendship older than politics
Amitabh has often described the first meeting. Rajiv was two, Amitabh four, at a fancy-dress gathering on Bank Road in Allahabad. The families remained close through school holidays, films screened at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and later adult life in Delhi. When Sonia Maino arrived in India before her marriage, she stayed with the Bachchans. The bond was personal enough that Rajiv, after becoming Prime Minister in the grief-soaked weeks after 31 October 1984, asked Amitabh to stand by him.
Amitabh later said the decision was emotional. He wanted to help a friend. He contested the 1984 Lok Sabha election from Allahabad as a Congress candidate against former Uttar Pradesh chief minister H.N. Bahuguna and won with more than 68 per cent of the vote. It was a landslide built on stardom, sympathy after Indira’s killing, and the Congress wave. He was not a career politician. He has said more than once that he realised quickly how hard the work was—listening to every side, answering every demand, keeping promises he could not keep.
Indira Gandhi, according to her aide M.L. Fotedar’s memoir The Chinar Leaves, had already warned Rajiv against this exact step. Days before her assassination she told her son, in Fotedar’s telling, never to bring “Teji’s son” into electoral politics. Rajiv heard her in silence and, after her death, did the opposite. Fotedar also claimed that once Amitabh became an MP he began to be seen as interfering in appointments and transfers, and that senior Congress leaders complained. Those claims, like Bhartiya’s, come from memoirs written long after the events. They cannot be treated as official record. They do show how quickly the friendship entered the machinery of party and government.
Bofors, Switzerland, and a resignation
The political weather changed in 1986–87. V.P. Singh, then Finance Minister, was widely perceived as targeting large business houses and, by extension, people close to the Prime Minister. Amitabh’s brother Ajitabh had moved to Switzerland. In the climate of the time, Switzerland meant numbered accounts. Stories circulated that Ajitabh was handling unexplained money—sometimes described as the Bachchans’, sometimes as Rajiv’s. No court ever established that Amitabh received Bofors kickbacks. Journalist Chitra Subramaniam, who investigated the Swedish deal for years, has said there was no evidence that Amitabh took money. Swedish police chief Sten Lindström later said investigators had no proof that Rajiv or Amitabh received kickbacks. The damage did not wait for proof.
By mid-1987 the pressure was intense. Indian Express reported on a flat Ajitabh had bought in Montreux. Opposition leaders used the actor’s name as a weapon against Rajiv. Amitabh resigned from the Lok Sabha in July 1987, roughly two and a half years after his record win. V.P. Singh later won the Allahabad by-election—the outcome Rajiv had feared. Amitabh has given other reasons too: an incident in Assam when a young opposition supporter, still a fan, begged him to leave because the campaign was tearing people apart; a sense that he could not deliver what he had promised Allahabad; a feeling that he was not cut out for the job. All of those can be true at once. The Bofors cloud made staying politically expensive for both men.
Bhartiya’s book adds a sharper scene. When Amitabh wanted to quit, Rajiv tried to stop him. Then Teji Bachchan came along and, according to the author, said her son would remain in Parliament if he was made Foreign Minister. Rajiv, the book says, was stunned and simply stared. Whether the demand was made in those words is known only through Bhartiya. What is not in dispute is that trust had already thinned.
The ten-minute visit
After the 1989 election, Congress lost power. Rajiv left the Prime Minister’s residence. Amitabh went to 10 Janpath. The meeting was short. The “snake” line followed. In political language the word means someone who smiles, then bites—someone whose loyalty cannot be trusted when the cost rises. Bhartiya presents it as the product of accumulated grievance: the resignation Rajiv did not want, the family demand, the scandals that had attached themselves to a friendship Rajiv once treated as unsinkable, and the simple fact that the two men were no longer useful to each other in the same way.
The book also records a later rupture with Sonia Gandhi. After Rajiv’s assassination in 1991, Sonia, worried about Rahul’s college fees in London, asked Amitabh for help. He replied that money had been “messed up” by Lalit Suri and Satish Sharma, then sent a cheque for 1,000 dollars. Sonia returned it. Bhartiya writes that she never forgot the episode and cut Amitabh out of her life. Again, this is one author’s account. The public cooling between the families after the late 1980s is real enough; the exact cheque story rests on the memoir.
What the remark actually tells us
Rajiv Gandhi never put the sentence on record. Amitabh has not confirmed it in those words. The source is a politician-journalist who was close to V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar and who filled a 500-page book with closed-door conversations. Memoirs of that kind mix memory, score-settling, and detail that only insiders would know. They should be read as claims, not as verdicts.
Even so, the story fits a larger pattern. The Gandhi–Bachchan friendship was built in a world of homes, holidays, and personal obligation. The moment it entered Parliament, Swiss rumours, defence contracts, and succession fights, it had to survive rules that private affection cannot rewrite. Amitabh entered politics to stand with a friend and left when the friend’s government, and then the friend’s opposition years, could no longer protect either of them from the cost of that association. Rajiv, if Bhartiya is right, saw not the boy from Bank Road but a man who had walked away when the alliance became dangerous—and who still expected the old warmth at 10 Janpath.
That is why the word still travels. It is not a mystery about reptiles. It is a reminder that in Indian public life, the closest friendships are often the first to be tested when power slips, scandal arrives, and a ten-minute visit is all that remains of a lifetime.
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