Thirty F1s were generated using six rice genotypes with different levels of resistance to false smut based on Griffing’s full diallel fashion and evaluated at Hybrid Rice Evaluation Centre, Gudalur (Hotspot location), Tamil Nadu, India to understand the disease reaction, gene action and combining ability for seven disease related and 13 agronomic traits. Highly significant lower mean disease incidence of number of infected grains per panicle was recorded in the parents, RG170 and RG172. Eight and 11 crosses exhibited highly resistant and resistant reaction respectively. GCA variance was numerically higher than the SCA variance for 16 traits and Baker’s ratio revealed strong additive gene action for five traits. Combining ability analysis revealed marked variations of gca and sca effects for most of the studied traits in parents and crosses respectively. Parent RG 170 was inferred as the best general combiner for false smut disease resistance and agronomic traits. The crosses RG170/BPT5204 and RG162/RNR15048 expressed desirable sca effects for most of the resistance traits notably, number of infected plants, number of infected tillers and percentage of infected tillers. Use of one parents with resistance or moderate resistance would provide adequate false smut resistance combined with yield. The crosses identified from the present study viz., RG162/RG170, RG162/BPT5204, RNR15048/RG162, RG22/BPT5204, RG170/RG172 and BPT5204/ RG172 can be further utilized in pedigree breeding by scoring for false smut resistance in each generation and selection for other agronomic traits based on gene action in order to develop recombinants combining yield and false smut resistance in rice.