The Tashkent Files: Vivek Agnihotri's film on Lal Bahadur Shastri's mysterious death to release on 12 April

The first look poster of Vivek Agnihotri’s suspense thriller The Tashkent Files was unveiled on Tuesday, announcing that the film will hit theatres on 12 April. The film is based on the mysterious death of India’s second prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent (formerly a part of USSR, now in Uzbekistan) in 1966. By his own admission, Agnihotri’s film is the “most apolitical film on a political figure”. With bold letters, the poster highlights that ‘after defeating Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister (was) mysteriously dead’. A small black and white stamp photo of Shastri dominates the foreground.

Mithun Chakraborty, Naseeruddin Shah, Shweta Basu, Pankaj Tripathi, Vinay Pathak, Mandira Bedi, Pallavi Joshi, Ankur Rathee and Prakash Belawadi... #TheTashkentFiles to release on 12 April 2019... Directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri... Zee Studios release... First look poster: pic.twitter.com/huxc6BQ10s

— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) March 19, 2019

(_Read: Vivek Agnihotri, Naseeruddin Shah talk about making Tashkent, a film based on Lal Bahadur Shastri's life_) While official reports claim that the former prime minister died of a heart attack, several conspiracy theories suggest that Shastri was poisoned. The theories are bolstered by the fact that his personal physician, who said that Shastri had so sign of a heart trouble before, was killed in a road accident shortly after Shastri’s death. Agnihotri had announced in January that he would make a film on the “truth of the biggest cover-up of free India” on Twitter. The Tashkent Files features a stellar cast that includes the names of Mithun Chakraborty, Naseeruddin Shah, Shweta Basu, Pankaj Tripathi, Vinay Pathak, Mandira Bedi, Pallavi Joshi, Ankur Rathee and Prakash Belawadi.