As vivid and biased as director Vivek Agnihotri's tweets

Tashkent Files are the kind of film you get when you are organizing an offline meeting of the online community that has rallied to Quora's question, "Is Lal Bahadur Shastri died of a natural death? "

Of course no, the last bellows of the Vivek Agnihotri cope. Agnihotri records hysteria in history as he claims to discover the truth about the death of the former prime minister in Tashkent in the former Soviet Union on January 11, 1966, the day after the signing of a peace treaty between India and Pakistan following the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965.. Official sources tell us that Shastri died of a heart attack. But conspiracy theories about his sudden disappearance, fueled by his family and a handful of books over the years, have kept the pot simmering.

The film of Agnihotri which seems to have completely escaped the attentions of the Indian Electoral Commission, formulates vague badertions about the alleged conspirators before approaching its goal: the party of Congress and its leader, Indira Gandhi It will not be a spoiler to say that for Agnihotri, the real bad guys in history are Gandhi, who succeeded Shastri as prime minister, and the Soviet intelligence services, the KGB.

The alternative history lesson is fatally dedicated to "All Honest Journalists". The controversy of Agnihotri revolves around Ragini (Shweta Basu Prasad), a journalist who is on the dock accused of having disguised the facts for his latest scoop. A mysterious source, Deep Throat, of this film, gives Ragini a blow for redemption – an opportunity to tell the true story behind Shastri's death and government cover-up.

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Ragini's report puts it in the hands of the mediocre minister of the interior, Natarajan (Naseeruddin Shah). However, his article on the front page leads to the formation of a committee headed by Shyam Sundar Tripathi (Mithun Chakraborty) and including, among others, historian Aisha Ali Shah (Pallavi Joshi), scientist Gangaram Jha ( Pankaj Tripathi) and a former researcher and badyst. Wing Commander Ananthsuresh (Prakash Belwadi). Ragini is added to the committee and she continues her investigations aside.

Strangely, the presence of a RAW fixture in the committee brings no revelation, so it is left to Ragini to browse the images and files, heartily, to Google. , meet open sources and cite books that cast doubt on Shastri's death from the beginning. This will ensure a renewed interest in publications such as KR Malkani, the party ideologue Bharatiya Janata Political Mysteries which examines the badbadination of political leaders, and Conversations with the crow a series of interviews with Robert Trumbull Crowley, former intelligence officer, about alleged alleged shenanigans by his employer.

Agnihotri sure did his research: the closing credits include excerpts from the two-volume archive of former KGB agent Vasili Mitrokhin The Mitrokhin Archive which made strong claims about the KGB's attempt to influence just about every major country on the planet, including India.

In the movie, Ragini declares that nobody does it. interested in Shastri's death, but who uses it to advance an agenda. The observation can of course also apply to the 144-minute film whose goals are far-off – the congressional party, this reliable punching bag called "Lutyen's Delhi", historians who allegedly tampered with state-sponsored versions of truth, media overthrowers, the educational system.The character of Pankaj Tripathi also slips into the thoughts of the community about Muslims – they will come with their armies to destroy the & musulmans musulmans musulmans musulmans musulmans pour pour pour pour pour pour India, he said.

Historian Aisha issues a symbolic dissent when she notes that the committee is dealing with a "story war": this allows the film to be broadcast many fictional theories in the film hopefully people will start to believe them.Of course, Aisha is described as an "intellectual terrorist" and his claims are denied.

Other "terrorists" of this type hide in the comi Té and Agnihotri proposes names for each of them: "political terrorist", "judicial terrorist", "terrorist TRP". (The last category is represented by a television presenter who looks like Caravan magazine's Caravan magazine Hartosh Singh Bal .]

The tone is as shrill and offbeat as Agnihotri's inopportune tweets and his appearances on television. Agnihotri began his career as a director with Chocolate (2005), a copy of the Hollywood production The Usual Suspects (1995). A film about football and some erotic thrillers followed before Agnihotri found his vocation as a director for the Modi era.

Agnihotri's movie in 2016 A Buddha in a traffic jam, who targeted the ideas of the left, was a zeitgeist film perfect for Age of Modi. The Tashkent records also fuel the fear that leftists pose a serious danger to the nation. Look what happened when they took power in the 1960s, recommends the movie. India has become a colony again 10 years after Shastri's death, it seems. Why has the word "socialist" been added to the Constitution? Even Aisha can not explain that, although true historians may be able to.

The craziest theory concerns Subhas Chandra Bose. Agnihotri weaves his fiction with interviews with Shastri's grandson, Sanjay Nath Singh, and former journalist Anuj Dhar, whose mission is to prove that the Bose freedom fighter has actually survived. to the air crash of 1945. Bose appears as one of the so-called unexplained elements of Shastri's death – he was apparently in Tashkent at that time.

As Ragini becomes the vehicle of an ad hominem attack against institutions and governments prior to the current government, we begin to worry about his mental health. The talented Shweta Basu Prasad gives The files of Tashkent more serious than she deserves, but her hysterical journalist is about as credible as the film claims that the recognized history of independent India is a big lie. The rigor that was needed to prove Agnihotri's thesis is missing, and the cunning of his selective targeting rout The Tashkent Files of his attempt to thrill effective conspiracy.