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The Tashkent Files film to uncover mystery behind Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death, to release on 15th April

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The poster of Vivek Agnihotri’s suspense thriller The Tashkent Files was released recently.

The poster says, “after defeating Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister (was) mysteriously dead.It also has a small black and white stamp photo of Shastri.


The director who is well known for his Buddha in a Traffic Jam shared the film’s poster on his twitter handle, which said, “The man you know… The mystery you don’t! # TheTashkentFiles Releasing 15th April.


In a statement, Agnihotri said the film is, “most apolitical on a political figure”.

The film’s team shared its cast, mentioning the roles played by some. Mithun Chakraborty plays the leader of opposition Shyam Sundar Tripathi, Pankaj Tripathi to play Gangaram Jha, scientist and Shweta Basu Prasad plays Raagini Phule, a rookie journalist.


The rest of the cast whose characters have not yet been revealed include Naseeruddin Shah, Vinay Pathak, Mandira Bedi, Pallavi Joshi, Ankur Rathee and Prakash Belawadi.

The Tashkent Files is about the death of India’s second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent under mysterious circumstances.

He was in Tashkent (then former USSR) for a peace agreement between India and Pakistan to resolve the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. The Tashkent Declaration (10th January 1966), as the agreement was known, was moderated by former Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin between the Indian PM Shastri and Pakistan’s then-President Muhammad Ayub Khan.

The following day it was reported that the PM died at 2 in the morning due to a heart attack.

While many claim that the former PM died of a heart attack in Uzbekistan in 1966, several conspiracy theories suggest that Shastri was poisoned. This suggestion is made with regard to the fact that his personal physician, who had said Shastri had no sign of heart trouble before, was killed in a road accident shortly after the PM’s death.

Earlier in January, Agnihotri had announced on Twitter that he would make a film on the “truth of the biggest cover-up of free India”. The director’s last release had drawn attention.


A semi-autobiographical, socio-political drama (Buddha in a Traffic Jam) that dealt with Naxal-intelligentsia inter-meddling had seen large scale violent protests upon its release, which had prevented the film’s screening in a few campuses.

According to the director, his homage to the former PM on Twitter a couple of years ago and the response he got from there, inspired him to make a film on the subject.

Agnihotri asserts that though he does not subscribe to the conspiracy theories surrounding Shastri’s death, an assistant who researched the topic for two years found that there was a larger conspiracy hatched against India. It was then that he decided to take up the subject and do something about it seriously.

The film is slated to release on 12th April 2019.

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