Amitabh Bachchan has hit back at online trolls who wished him death from Covid-19, saying they will have to “weather the swipe storm” from his more than 90 million followers.
The Bollywood star and his actor son, Abhishek, have been fighting the coronavirus in a Mumbai hospital for more than two weeks. Bachchan's daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai and granddaughter Aaradhya left the hospital on Monday after recovering from the virus.
My God! That's quite an emotional outburst from Amitabh Bachchan!! https://t.co/wk301NO8mK pic.twitter.com/OzSGg5F096
— Karthik 🇮🇳 (@beastoftraal) July 29, 2020
The family members are among the most high-profile people in India to have tested positive for Covid-19. The state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, has more than 366,000 confirmed cases, with more than 1,200 new patients being reported each day.
Nationally, the country of 1.3 billion people has reported more than 32,000 deaths.
Bachchan, 77, and his son, 44, are currently staying in the hospital’s isolation ward. The star frequently gives updates to his condition on his social media platforms and posted the latest open letter on Tumblr.
“There are only two things that can happen,” Bachchan wrote: “Either I shall die or I shall live. If I die you won’t get to write your diatribe anymore […] If I live and survive you shall have to be weathering the swipe storm, not just from me, but on a very conservative level, from 90+ million followers.”
Bachchan – who has appeared in more than 200 Bollywood films and is affectionately known as "Big B" – went on to describe his fans as his "extended family", who he said will come after the trolls and become an "extermination family".
He concluded the letter with: “May you burn in your own stew!”
