When Rajesh Khanna blamed others for his films flopping: ‘He felt there was a conspiracy against him, turned on people’

Rajesh Khanna’s unbroken streak of 15 consecutive hits in the early 1970s still baffles filmgoers as this level of success had never been seen any film actor. The swift pace that got him fame and adulation vanished just as quickly and Rajesh Khanna could not figure out what had gone wrong. Salim Khan, of the writing duo Salim-Javed, had gotten his first big break with Rajesh’s film Haathi Mere Saathi. This was the first joint credit of Salim-Javed as a writing duo and Salim Khan recalled in a 2014 book how he saw Rajesh Khanna’s downfall.
In the book Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar Yaseer Usman, Salim Khan talked about how Rajesh dealt with his failure. He said, “When his films started flopping, he didn’t look within to evaluate what was going wrong and where. He started blaming others. He used to feel that there was some conspiracy against him.”
The book also discusses how Rajesh Khanna wanted to create a sort of ‘camp’ in the movies where he would have people work with him exclusively. Salim-Javed were not interested in this and made their decision clear to him, which he wasn’t impressed . Salim shared in the book, “His cronies used to instigate him in such matters. We [Javed and I] told him, ‘You are doing ten films with different producers and expect that we work only with you. How is that possible?’ But he did not have the maturity to understand that we would work with him as well as other stars. He was a very possessive person nature.”

His lack of ‘maturity’ had many around him feed him stories that led to his ‘isolation’. Ajit Ghosh, who handled Rajesh Khanna’s PR, told Usman for the book, “If he was told someone has criticised him, he would believe it and turn against that person without bothering to verify [the facts]. That was the reason he became isolated. He made more enemies than friends.”
Salim Khan shared something similar and said that Rajesh Khanna did not like it when people disagreed with him and saw it as an act of opposition. “If someone even suggested something that was not of his choice, he would take it as opposition. He never took to disagreements kindly. Then he used to act in a manner as if the person, even a close one, was his enemy,” he said.
Rajesh Khanna in a 1990 interview had spoken about the God-like feeling that he felt after becoming a star. He told Movie magazine years later, “I felt next to God!”
Rajesh Khanna passed away in 2012 at the age of 69.