Vivek Agnihotri’s The Tashkent Files begins with a dedication to “all honest journalists of India”, and thus begins, quite early on, the filmmaker’s not-so-discreet jibes at all the institutions and ideologies, he believes, have wrecked the nation. Through his characters, he classifies them —NGOs are “social terrorists”, Supreme Court judges are “judicial terrorists”, writers and historians are “intellectual terrorists” and the media, of course, is “TRP terrorists”. The ones who are not a terrorist, it appears, is Lal Bahadur Shastri, around whose death the film is centred, and the ones who fought against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. India, he insists, became a colony again ten years after Shastri died.The Tashkent Files 2019 Movie Download.
It’s quite apparent that Agnihotri is presenting an ideological slide show using Shastri’s death as a conduit. How did the second Prime Minister of India die? That’s a question that could very well make for a captivating thriller with its many conspiracy theories but the filmmaker uses this opportunity to take down left, secular and socialist ideologies and institutions, in a fashion that is unintentionally comical. It’s quite amusing how the film appropriates terms like “anti-national”, “presstitutes” and “fake news”, which have famously been the armour of the current regime and its followers. Then there are some facile and tokenistic “balanced” arguments, or “war of narratives” as a historian character, Aiysha (Pallavi Joshi) puts it, which are bound to throw off right-wing ideologues completely. Not to mention the casting of the vocal critic of the current regime, Naseeruddin Shah (albeit to play a malicious minister).The Tashkent Files 2019 Movie Download.
The Tashkent Files’ agenda comes clear only in its climax, although it’s a no-brainer, as the film keeps referring to the Emergency in as many ways as possible. The filmmaker wishes to be subtle by not taking names (for the most part) and even censoring them in “official documents” but clearly subtlety is not Agnihotri’s forte.