The latter is only a pretext to beat dead horses. It is abundantly clear that The Tashkent Files is interested more in slandering Shastri's successor than getting to the bottom of the truth about the death of a Prime Minister.

But no matter what it does, it is unable to conceal its blinkered, tendentious approach to history.ДЄlthough Indira Gandhi isn't mentioned by name - one suspects the censors have had a role to play here - she is ever-present by implication. Its crudely fictionalized world gives factual accuracy a wide berth but seeks legitimacy by incorporating recorded submissions by real-life figures - Shastri's political heirs Sunil and Anil, the late editor and Shastri's press secretary Kuldip Nayar and journalist Anuj Dhar. One character in the film admits (with striking honesty, one must say) that 'truth is a luxury'. It makes much of the addition of 'socialist' to the preamble of the Constitution during the Emergency, but steers clear of 'secular' (at least in the context of the statute) although the word was prefixed to 'sovereign republic of India' via the same contentious 42nd Amendment. All it manages to put together is a painfully overlong, abysmally ham-fisted filmed political pamphlet ruing the supposedly ruinous path that India took in the post-Shastri years. On paper, the film takes upon itself the onus of cracking the 'mystery' of the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's second Prime Minister, in Tashkent in early 1966. You don't have to be a genius to figure out the 'philosophy' The Tashkent Files is driving at. In the end, it places the only card that it is genuinely interested in on the table - its love for a 'strong' leader who can inflict military defeat on Pakistan.

The unabashedly partisan film does a great deal of hectoring and hollering for nearly two and a half hours but to no real avail. Banking upon crowd-sourced research, it peddles untruths and half-truths culled from unverified quarters and seeks to pass itself off as a great, gutsy piece of investigative cinema. No two ways about it: The Tashkent Files is Google search filmmaking at its worst. Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Mithun Chakraborty, Shweta Basu Prasad, Mandira Bedi, Pallavi Joshi, Rajesh Sharma, Vinay Pathak, Pankaj Tripathi

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