Arnab Goswami: ...People are being told they can't eat beef, they can't consume beef, they can't bring beef into Maharashtra.

Amitabh Bachchan: Is there a law? Is there a law that has been passed?

Goswami: Yes, there is a law which has been passed on that subject.

Bachchan: Really?

.................

Bachchan: I'm a vegetarian. So I won't be able to....

Goswami: Sir, don't avoid it.

Bachchan: Sorry?

Goswami: Don't avoid it.

Bachchan: No, no, seriously. I really don't know what the issue is.

( Excerpts from the transcript of an interview last weekend on Times Now)

June 4: Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's Angry Young Man of the 1970s, has self-confessedly turned into a peace-loving septuagenarian, anxious to evade controversy and keen to play it safe in all situations.

Many among the audience would have shared interviewer Arnab Goswami's incredulity when the actor, known to comment on myriad issues on his blog and the social media, claimed he was unaware of the recent beef ban in his home state.

The ban, enforced on March 3 this year after President Pranab Mukherjee gave his assent to a pending law passed 20 years ago by a Shiv Sena-BJP government, has triggered a nationwide debate, inviting criticism even from within the acting fraternity.

After expressing his ignorance of the ban, Bachchan quickly added that if such a law had indeed been passed, it should be followed.

As Goswami kept expressing his disappointment at Bachchan's safety-first stance, the actor replied that at 73, he simply wanted to live a peaceful life.

Among old-timers in Delhi's political circles, though, the actor's answers evoked no surprise.

While Bachchan was perhaps looking to avoid antagonising any section of his fans and followers, people who have watched his career since the 1970s say he has a history of preferring discretion to valour in public and political affairs.

It's a trait that has often shaped his ties with the Nehru-Gandhis, causing fluctuations in a high-profile association that goes back seven decades.

Through the 21 months of the Emergency that Indira Gandhi had declared in June 1975, Bachchan had kept mum against the curtailment of civil rights even when his peers in the film industry suffered.

He looked the other way when All India Radio and Doordarshan banned singer Kishore Kumar, many of whose hits he had lipped. Ditto when Dev Anand and Pran were targeted, allegedly for offending information and broadcasting minister Vidya Charan Shukla and Sanjay Gandhi's acolytes by refusing to praise Sanjay and the Youth Congress on government-run television and radio.

Around that time in 1976, both Amitabh and wife Jaya were seen by Sanjay's side at a musical soiree, Geeton Bhari Sham, organised in Delhi ostensibly to raise money for Sanjay's controversial family planning programme.

Bachchan's silence perhaps contained an element of symbiosis --- the Emergency's censorship of all kinds of media, including film journalism, ensured the muzzling of any gossip about Amitabh and the luscious Zeenat Aman.

The Nehru-Gandhi links came handy in many ways: Shukla cleared Sholay with minor cuts at a time director Ramesh Sippy and scriptwriters Salim-Javed feared the film would not get past the censors.

At the time, few plays or films that carried even a hint of resistance against oppression could escape a ban, with the authorities sniffing defiance and incitement everywhere.

The Bachchans, though, distanced themselves from the Nehru-Gandhis when, after Indira's fall from power, the Janata government of Morarji Desai went after her and son Sanjay.

Sanjay's side of the family claims the Bachchans had been invited to a public rally but the actor's mother, Teji, declined citing her son's film career.

Sanjay was said to be livid and the relations between the two families snapped for a while. Sanjay was also upset when he arrived in Mumbai to find that Bachchan, who always received him, was not at the airport.

But these spats did not fester, probably because the elders in the two families could not forget the depth of their past friendship. The ties were rejuvenated when Rajiv Gandhi entered politics after Sanjay's death in June 1980. By then, Indira was in power again.

To one of Goswami's questions, Bachchan said he didn't feel angry about the Emergency but quickly added that it was "perhaps the wrong decision" to impose it and that "democracy was being curtailed", with even the film industry feeling the heat.

He agreed with the interviewer that Bollywood, and he himself, did as a rule not want to upset the "powers that be".

Bachchan's remarks on the beef ban may have been prompted partly by his past brushes with trouble which, for all his carefulness, he has not been able to avoid entirely. Some of these have flown from his associations with the Congress during Rajiv's days at the helm.

Unconfirmed reports about some of Bachchan's alleged comments following Indira's assassination on October 31, 1984, made him an object of attacks --- from Australia to Leicester in Britain --- from protesters against the Sikh killings that followed.

The actor has denied making any provocative remarks but his name frequently figures in rights watchdog Amnesty's reports on the 1984 pogrom.

Threats of demonstrations from Amnesty and Sikh groups prompted Bachchan to back out of two events that Labour MP Keith Vaz had planned, in London and Leicester, in June 2012 to celebrate his 25 years in Parliament. Bachchan was to be the chief guest.

Vaz issued a statement explaining the actor was unwell. But less than a month later, Bachchan was running with the Olympic Torch on London's streets to boos from Sikh groups.

At a Delhi court yesterday, the CBI produced a statement from Bachchan saying he did not remember whether then Congress strongman Jagdish Tytler was at Teen Murti Bhavan when Indira's body was kept there for three days before her cremation.

Bachchan's testimony is expected to have a crucial bearing on the fate of Tytler, accused of inciting Sikh killings. The CBI had recorded the actor's statement on June 15, 2013, in which he admitted having known Tytler well and met him at Sanjay's residence.

When Goswami asked about the Bofors controversy, which had not just dethroned Rajiv but destroyed his friendship with Bachchan, the actor spoke at length about how the media had tarnished him with allegations of kickbacks in the howitzer deal.

Bachchan said he had always advised people not to take the establishment on. He kept telling the interviewer how "apolitical" he had been.

He had voiced the same logic --- his unease and lack of affinity with politics --- when he abruptly dumped Parliament and the Nehru-Gandhis post-Bofors in 1987.

That estrangement, with almost a poetic sense of destiny, had symbolised Rajiv's downfall. It was V.P. Singh's 1988 Lok Sabha by-election win from Allahabad --- the seat Bachchan had resigned --- that galvanised a fragmented Opposition, spurring it to unite and humble the Congress in the following year's general election.

The Bachchans' association with politics did not end, however. A decade on, they veered close to the Samajwadi Party courtesy power broker Amar Singh, and Jaya entered the Rajya Sabha in July 2004.

Amar has repeatedly cited how the Bachchans distanced themselves from him when he fell out with the party. Jaya earned a re-nomination and is set to continue in the upper House till March 2018.