Police in Kerala are investigating a controversial Bollywood film that portrays the southern Indian state as a hub of Islamic terrorism and forced conversion.
The Kerala Story, directed by Sudipto Sen, has come under criticism for its fictional depiction of tens of thousands of women from Kerala who it claims were converted to Islam and became terrorists for Islamic State in Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria.
A teaser trailer features an actor playing a Hindu woman who becomes a victim of an apparent “dangerous game” of conversion. “I wanted to become a nurse and serve humanity,” she says directly to the camera while dressed in a niqab. “Now I am Fatima Ba, an Isis terrorist in a jail in Afghanistan. I am not alone.”
The film trailer goes on toclaim that “there are 32,000 girls like me who have been converted and buried in the deserts of Syria and Yemen. A deadly game is being played to convert normal girls into dreaded terrorists in Kerala … will nobody stop them?”
The film-makers say the film is based on real information and events but have not provided any evidence or official reports to back their claims.
There was anger in India’s southern states following the trailer’s release. BR Aravindakshan, a journalist based in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, filed a petition to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the office of the chief minister of Kerala and the Kerala police accusing the film of distributing “false information” and said its contents should be investigated and the release halted.
After Kerala’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, directed the state’s police to investigate the complaint, a criminal case has been registered against the trailer. Police in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram district are investigating allegations of misinformation and spreading of communal hatred.
VD Satheesan, the state assembly opposition leader, said the film was “a clear case of misinformation” and called for it to be banned over the risk of “spreading hatred”.
The film’s events appear to be inspired by four women from Kerala who converted to Islam and travelled with their husbands to Afghanistan to join IS in Khorasan province between 2016 and 2018. Their husbands were all killed and after surrendering in 2019; the four women are all still in Afghan jails, with the Indian government refusing to take them back.
There is no evidence that there were thousands of such cases in Kerala as the film alleges.
Kerala, considered India’s most progressive state with the highest levels of literacy and mortality, has long been ruled by a heavily leftwing, secular government. So far it has electorally rejected the Hindu nationalist politics that have come to dominate India’s central government and northern states under the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). The BJP won no seats in Kerala in the last general election.
In response, though, Kerala has been accused by figures in the BJP of becoming a “breeding ground” for Islamic terrorism.
The Kerala Story follows The Kashmir Files, a Bollywood film that claimed to show the “real story” of the expulsion of a Hindu community from the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. The film-makers claimed it was based on real events but were accused of distorting facts and pushing anti-Muslim propaganda. Despite the controversies, it was one of India’s most successful films at the box office this year.
