Do we like Aamir Khan?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of social-issue work, a pro-LGBTQ+ episode and a water charity, with one contested 2015 remark and some gaps in the record.
Aamir Khan is Bollywood royalty by birth: his father was a film producer and his uncle a director, and he appeared on screen as a kid. The breakthrough was Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak in 1988, then a rocky patch of flops in the early 90s before the big hits came back.
From there he turned into the thinking person's superstar. He produced Lagaan, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and directed Taare Zameen Par in 2007, which one profile says helped prompt a change in Indian policy on learning disabilities.
The harm check comes out clean. His talk show Satyamev Jayate took on rape, domestic violence and honour killings, and a 2014 episode on LGBTQ+ rights drew a Chandigarh petition that alleged he had promoted homosexuality and breached a Supreme Court order. The court issued him a notice, and the article we read reports no ruling. When Section 377 was struck down in 2018, he was among the Bollywood names who publicly welcomed it.
His one big stoush was in 2015, when he said he was “alarmed” by a run of incidents in India, and a storm followed. He then said he had no plans to leave and that he was misunderstood. In January 2016 he said: “I was born here and I will die here.” The remarks were revived in the 2022 boycott campaign against Laal Singh Chaddha, and he answered it with “Please don’t boycott my film.” Where you land depends on whether you read it as honest worry or as a slight on India.
The recent news is nasty but not about anything he did wrong. In July 2026 Outlook reported a social-media post and audio clip, attributed to the Bishnoi gang, threatening him and accusing him of promoting “love jihad”. Outlook could not verify either, and he had not responded to the threats. Before that he had addressed the “love jihad” talk in an interview, saying family members have married Hindus and Christians without any conversion.
The good stuff is real. He co-founded the Paani Foundation, which runs the Satyamev Jayate Water Cup, a village contest on water conservation across drought-hit Maharashtra. One report says about 1,300 villages joined a later round, and a foundation adviser said 80% of the previous year’s villages stopped relying on water tankers.