Tashkent Files answers where Right-wing Twitter warrior Vivek Agnihotri is going next

After abusing liberals as part of his ‘urban Naxal’ project and filling young minds with propaganda, Vivek Agnihotri returns with an effective thriller.

Vivek Agnihotri | Facebook

The last five years have been a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories. And vying for a space in the list of theorists is someone who took a vow to demystify one of the most mysterious chapters that has had the Indian public hooked for the past over fifty years: Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri with his take on India’s second prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death – or murder. With The Tashkent Files, Agnihotri has brought back one of the most intriguing stories of our times in the manner that saw Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose being declared the Gumnami Baba, or how the suspicious death of Syama Prasad Mookerjee in judicial custody acquired the status of President John F Kennedy’s lone gunman theory being untrue, or 9/11 being an inside job and the Sandy Hook mass shooting being manufactured to promote gun control. 

In America, Oliver Stone may perhaps be considered as the first filmmaker to give respectability to what had until then been mere conjecture on the Kennedy assassination in JFK (1991). At the height of his powers, Stone was perceived as a visionary director, celebrated and feted, before becoming somewhat of a joke.

Vivek Agnihotri, 45, is not exactly Oliver Stone, but for a Right-wing that believes it has been done in by Left liberals, he performs one of the most useful services. Since his last movie, Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016), which aimed to prove the infiltration of urban Naxals in positions of power in various academic and media organisations, Vivek Agnihotri, has been happy to have acted as the battering Ram against evil, mainstream Ravanas. 

Whether motivated by genuine belief or political convenience (like the Narendra Modi-selfie-taking Bollywood gang led by producer-director Karan Johar), Agnihotri has emerged as a vital voice in the Right-wing’s intellectual firmament, appearing in panel discussions, baiting Left liberals on social media and most importantly, making entertainment that fits into the revised cultural paradigm that usually echoes the narrative popular on Right-wing news channels — that Jawaharlal Nehru and his family were responsible for everything that went awry in India. This is usually accompanied by several attempts at what-might-have-beens — if Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had become first prime minister or if Lal Bahadur Shastri had not died in Tashkent.

Agnihotri’s latest movie, The Tashkent Files, focuses on the latter. “We killed Shastriji twice,” says a character in the movie. “First when he died, and second by allowing him to be erased from the national consciousness.” The movie, relying heavily on research, including 20 RTIs, is an effective thriller, juxtaposing a journalist’s lonely search for the truth (aided only by a Deep Throat like source on the phone, voiced by Agnihotri himself) with the goings-on in a commission of inquiry.

The journalist’s search takes her deep inside a shadow world, featuring spies who never die, sources who get run over by buses, and an official wall of intimidation. With a formidable cast led by Mithun Chakraborty as a manipulative politician who heads the commission of inquiry, Naseeruddin Shah as a home minister with a penchant for keeping secrets, Pankaj Tripathi as a Muslim-bashing scientist, and Pallavi Joshi as a sceptical historian who is accused of perpetuating mythology as history, the film is engaging, proving the point of its dialogue: “People don’t want truth, they want a story about truth”.

That truth is never quite clear — was Shastri’s death a heart attack or a state sponsored murder? And if it was the latter, was it because Shastri was about to announce that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was alive and had not died in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945, or was it because he was just the wrong man in the wrong position of power at the wrong time. “I have acted as a whistleblower with this film,” says Agnihotri, reiterating that all he wants is for the citizen’s right to truth be recognised.

At its preview last Sunday in New Delhi, The Tashkent Files roused an invited audience so much that some members would periodically break into cries of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, which can only mean a consolidation of Agnihotri’s growing importance in the pantheon of Right-wing intellectuals and artistes led by Modi government’s undeclared poet laureate Prasoon Joshi and its actress-in-permanent-angst Kangana Ranaut.

So who is Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri? As far as his movies are concerned, his record has been admittedly mixed. A former adman, Agnihotri’s Chocolate in 2005 was an attempt at a localised version of The Usual Suspects, Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007) was a semi-watchable football movie which raised issues of racism in England, and Hate Story (2012) relied considerably on Paoli Dam’s charms to involve viewers. Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016) was a film that almost no one was interested in until Agnihotri realised that it captured the zeitgeist on campuses, which is where he showed it, including famously to JNU, which was witnessing the agitation led by Kanhaiya Kumar. Buddha in a Traffic Jam was a jagged attempt to uncover the so-called “infiltration” of campuses by a Leftist ideology, but got bogged down by its own wordiness.

In Bollywood’s hierarchical world of star producers and their associated camps, Agnihotri remains an outsider, much like similar relevance-seeking entities. Though The Tashkent Files was ready in March 2018, he says no studio was interested in Shastri, alive or dead. Finally he went to Subhash Chandra of Zee, who backed it because he believes in a “good cause”.  

When the trailer hit social media, Agnihotri says young people responded to it in a very positive way. In fact, on social media, Agnihotri is a star, with a following of 153,000 on Twitter. It is this persona that is most problematic. From crowd-sourcing lists of those defending Urban Naxals, an act that echoes McCarthyism, to making a video defending the BJP government’s Rafale deal, he clearly crossed the line from would-be political artist to unquestioned political propagandist.

Does his politics make him a better filmmaker or does his cinema make him a better politician? While Buddha in a Traffic Jam‘s box office collection was Rs 40 lakh and The Tashkent Files has just been released, Agnihotri is a much sought after speaker, and his mix of whataboutery and demagoguery usually goes down well with self-declared protectors of India’s nationalist interests. 

But it is his routine and vague threats on social media that worryingly border on incitement to violence and intimidation. When a group of Bollywood actors, directors and writers asked people to “vote karo magar soch samajh ke“, he asked his followers to “save this video it will come really really handy in the future”. When JNU students struck work against the introduction of an MBA course, he described it as an Urban Naxals training camp and tweeted: “This is ‘intellectual pollution’ we must clean before Ganga.” And when actors Richa Chadha and Swara Bhasker criticised Kerala MLA PC George for making objectionable remarks against a nun who demanded the arrest of a bishop who had allegedly raped her, he tweeted: “Where is the placard – #MeTooProstituteNun”. The spunky Bhasker got Twitter to lock his account and forced him to delete the tweet.

That was in September last year. Clearly Agnihotri has lost neither his venom nor his vigour. Is The Tashkent Files a genuine attempt to begin the process of declassification of all secrets, irrespective of party or politics? Or is it a well-timed contrivance to embarrass the Congress party? Only Agnihotri knows. The sad part is, the developments around it has forced viewers to look at the movie purely through the political rather than aesthetic prism.

The author is a senior journalist.