Amitabh Bachchan

Amitabh Bachchan is an Indian film actor, born in Allahabad on 11 October 1942, who sat in the Lok Sabha for Allahabad as a Congress member from December 1984 to July 1987. In the record of the Panth he is the film star named by some survivors and Sikh bodies as having incited crowds against Sikhs after Indira Gandhi's assassination. He denies it. He is living, so what follows is attributed to those who make each claim and is not a finding.

The claims and the denial

• 21 October 2011: Sikh Siyasat reported that Jagdish Kaur, a prime witness of the November 1984 pogrom, who saw her husband and son killed and her three brothers burnt to death, told the Times of India that she watched the live relay on Doordarshan and saw Bachchan raise his arm and shout the blood-for-blood slogan twice.
• November 2011: the Akal Takht barred him from the inauguration of the Khalsa Heritage Complex at Anandpur Sahib, to which the Punjab government had invited him, and he declined. In a letter of 28 November to Jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh, as reported by The News Minute, he called the allegations wild, irresponsible and unfounded, said the Nehru-Gandhi family and his own had old ties from Allahabad, and called the charge that he was part of a crowd raising anti-Sikh slogans a preposterous lie. He attached a photograph of his maternal grandparents, who were Sikhs.
• December 2011: Sikh Siyasat reported that Manjit Singh Saini, now in California, had given Sikhs for Justice a sworn statement that on 31 October 1984 he saw Bachchan outside AIIMS shouting that Sikhs had killed Indira Gandhi, urging the crowd on against a turbaned Sikh, and raising the blood-for-blood slogan, after which the crowd attacked a Sikh. Saini said he had given a written statement to Delhi Police in 1985 and that nothing came of it.
• 2011 onward: Sikhs for Justice filed a criminal complaint against him in Australia. On 27 or 28 October 2014 a US District Court in Los Angeles issued a summons on a 35-page complaint by the group and two survivors, alleging that he instigated violence, with 21 days to respond after service. The reports opened do not say how that case ended.
• 1 November 2025: Akal Takht's officiating Jathedar, Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, said Bachchan remained unexonerated in the Sikh community's eyes, because Saini's statement had never been investigated by any government agency, even though Bachchan once wrote to the Takht claiming innocence. He said this after a controversy over the singer Diljit Dosanjh touching Bachchan's feet on a TV show.

Where it stands. The allegation rests on witness statements reported by Sikh Siyasat and The Tribune and on civil and criminal complaints filed abroad. Bachchan's denial is on record. The sources opened for this profile do not report any Indian court or commission ruling on the claim, and Sikh institutions say it was never investigated.