PM Modi stops to ask Amitabh Bachchan about his bandaged hand at Ram Mandir ceremony
A brief, folded-hands exchange between India's prime minister and its best-known actor at the Ayodhya consecration went viral within hours of the broadcast.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi stopped to greet actor Amitabh Bachchan and asked him about a visible bandage on his hand during the January 22, 2024, Pran Pratishtha consecration ceremony for the Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya, according to video of the encounter that circulated widely after the event.
Footage of the moment, shared and reported on by outlets including WION, shows Modi pausing as he moved through the gathering to greet Bachchan, who was seated in the front rows with folded hands, and asking him about the black bandaging visible on his hand. The two exchanged a brief greeting before Modi continued on. Clips of the interaction were widely shared on social media in the hours after the ceremony, including on Instagram, where the moment was captioned as a meeting between the two men at the temple.
What is not established from the available coverage is Bachchan's own explanation for the bandage, or precisely how he responded to Modi's question — none of the reporting on the viral clip records his reply. Separately, reporting from the following months shows Bachchan's son, actor Abhishek Bachchan, was hospitalized in August 2021 for a hand injury sustained on a film set and later underwent surgery; whether that is connected to the elder Bachchan's bandaged hand at the January 2024 ceremony is not confirmed by any source found for this account, and the two events are more than two years apart.
The ceremony the moment happened at
The Pran Pratishtha was the consecration of the Ram Lalla idol at the newly built Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, a temple constructed on a site whose ownership had been the subject of a decades-long legal and religious dispute before India's Supreme Court ruled on it in 2019. Modi presided over the ceremony as its central figure, and it drew a guest list of prominent political, business and entertainment figures from across India, of whom Bachchan — a veteran of Hindi cinema for more than five decades — was among the most recognizable.
A moment built for virality
The interaction lasted only seconds on camera: Modi noticing Bachchan, pausing his walk through the crowd, gesturing toward the bandaged hand, and the two greeting each other with the traditional folded-hands namaste before Modi moved on. That brevity did not stop it from becoming one of the most-replayed personal moments of a ceremony that was otherwise built around religious ritual and political messaging, precisely because it read as a small, human aside inside a highly choreographed state event.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by WION and social media video of the January 22, 2024, Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha ceremony. It restores a story originally published on this site in January 2024; figures are as reported at the time.