Rajesh Khanna may be best known as a symbol of romance on the big screen in the 1960s and 1970s, but he was also a successful politician for a brief period in the 1990s. He continued to campaign for the Indian National Congress from 1984 until his death in 2012.
In a 2012 interview to PTI, months before he breathed his last, Rajesh, who campaigned for Congress in the 2012 Punjab election, took potshots at a couple of politicians in the state, including fellow actor Vinod Khanna and former cricketer and The Great Indian Laughter Challenge judge Navjot Singh Sidhu.
“Vinod Khanna had made bundle of promises with the voters in Gurdaspur including that he would set up a film academy but never honoured his words. The voters threw him out,” Rajesh Khanna had said then. Vinod Khanna was elected as an Member of Parliament under a Bhartiya Janata Party ticket in the Gurdaspur constituency in 1997, where he won the elections yet again in 1999 and 2004, respectively.
‘I would never like to ditch my own people with hollow promises like other politicians’
Vinod, who also served as the Union Minister for Culture and Tourism and Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs in the interim, lost the elections in Gurdaspur in 2009. However, he was re-elected in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He died of cancer in 2017. Meanwhile, Rajesh Khanna served as an MP from the New Delhi constituency under an INC ticket from 1992-96, post which he quit active politics.
Rajesh Khanna at a public rally in New Delhi. (Express archive photo by Ravi Batra)
“I would never like to ditch my own people with hollow promises like other politicians. I am of the opinion that when you are not able to serve the masses then don’t make fake promises to them since these are the sins,” Rajesh had said in the same interview. He was offered to contest the 2009 Lok Sabha elections by INC from the constituency of his hometown Amritsar, but he declined the same.
Rajesh Khanna also attacked Navjot Singh Sidhu, who’d won the Lok Sabha Elections from Amritsar in 2004 and 2009 on a BJP ticket. Rajesh referred to Sidhu as a “good comedian,” but claimed he can never be a good politician because “politics is not comedy.” Sidhu, a former cricketer, had also started judging the Star Plus comedy show The Great Indian Laughter Challenge in 2005.
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Sidhu claimed in 2014 that after being denied by BJP the chance to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar, he’d never contest elections from any other constituency. In 2016, Sidhu briefly former a new political front — Aawaz-e-Punjab. He contested in the 2017 Punjab Assembly elections yet again, but under an INC ticket, which he won and became the Minister of Tourism and Local Bodies in the state. He resigned from the cabinet in 2019 and last contested the Punjab Assembly Elections in 2022, which he lost.
