SHOULD THE KERALA STORY BE BANNED?

Last year it was the movie The Kashmir Files. This year it is The Kerala Story. One film deals with an extreme northern state, the other with an extreme southern. In this way our pro-Hindutva anti-Islamic forces have managed to cover the length of India if not its breadth. Both films are designed to create hatred in the minds of Hindus for Muslims. This is dangerous. A friend tells me that in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad they even held free screenings of The Kerala Story for women, as if to caution them against the love trap that Muslim men deviously set for them. And women went to see the film in large numbers.

Now, should we resort to cancel culture and ban The Kerala Story? Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, seems to think so. The columnist Vir Sanghvi argues that although he’s opposed to banning films in principle, The Kerala Story crosses all limits of acceptability and goes against the Constitution. So a call to ban the film is perhaps justified.  Asaduddin Owaisi, Lok Sabha member, and actor Naseeruddin Shah say that they don’t even intend to see the propagandist film that tarnishes an entire community, the community to which both of them belong. After all, every community and not just Muslims have their black sheep. Shah was quoted by anchor Rajdeep Sardesai on India Today news channel as comparing The Kerala Story to anti-Semitic films promoted by Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, Shashi Tharoor and Shabana Azmi say they want the film to be screened, ostensibly to let the audience decide for itself.

The trouble with cancel culture is that it gives legitimacy to the reactionary right-wing to, at the drop of a hat, ask for a ban on films, books and anything that offends their so-called religious sensibilities.

My view therefore is that we should all go to see The Kerala Story and then expose its lies through comments in the press, on radio and television, on social media, and by word of mouth. For, there is no doubt that the film is highly one-sided and exaggerated. It is hyperbole at its worst.

The Kerala Story deals with the stories of three young women, Shalini and Geetanjali, both Hindu, and Neemha, a Christian. They are students of a nursing college in Kasargod, North Kerala. Geetanjali’s parents are actually atheists who think of religion as opium. The vulnerable girls are brainwashed by their fourth roommate, a radicalized Muslim woman in hijab, who openly mocks Hindu gods and speaks of Allah as the one and only true saviour. Shalini and Geetanjali are also romantically enticed by two handsome Muslim men, one of them a medical student, who successfully convert them to Islam. The girls are then introduced to bogus Muslim clerics with a view to sending them to Syria via Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iran, to join ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  

The film attempts to mix ‘Love Jihad’ with Islamic militancy and terrorism. That the filmmaker, Vipul Amrutal Shah, chose to bring Love Jihad, which originated in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh, to Kerala, India’s most secular Communist state, speaks for itself. The intent clearly is mischief.

The men whom Shalini meets on her way to Syria are hardly devout Islamic believers whose mission in life is to spread the word of Allah. They turn out to be no more than misogynist murderers and rapists. In the end, Shalini is arrested in a foreign country without a passport. Geetanjali commits suicide when her boyfriend puts their intimate lovemaking scenes on social media, causing it to go viral. Neemha is gang-raped. The stories of all the three girls who set out to become nurses to attend to the sick and dying thus end tragically.

Messages flashed on the screen at the beginning and end of The Kerala Story claim that the film is based on the testimonies of some 32,000 Hindu girls. Yet we are also told that the website which provided this information turned out to be non-existent.

To find out for myself if the stories of Shalini, Geetanjali and Neemha portrayed in The Kerala Story are part of a pattern or mere isolated instances, I phoned a professor friend who teaches at the Central University of Kerala in Kasargod, and has lived in the town for over a decade. He had once invited me to read a paper at a seminar on documentary films held in his university.

“The film is 95% false and only 5% true,” the professor said. Apparently, the incident shown in the film had happened not in a nursing college but a dental college in Kasargod.  But just eight students of the college were sent to Syria by Islamic fundamentalists, of whom seven were men and only one was a woman. Moreover, it wasn’t just Kerala from where the youngsters were sent to Syria. They were also sent there from Bhatkal in coastal Karnataka.

As to the conversions to Islam, they are mostly resisted by the Christian community and not by others, the professor pointed out. Many of the conversions are voluntary—it is incorrect to suggest that all conversions are forced conversions. This belies the charge of Love Jihad.

The professor also told me that the locales shown in the film are not Kasargod. Kasargod does not have a single pub or mall, where Shalini, Geetanjali and Neemha are disrobed for not sporting the hijab.  Nor does it have the kind of wide sprawling  beaches in which some scenes are shot, which really seems to be somewhere in the Konkan. (I realized this while seeing the film, for after the seminar in Kasargod, I sauntered off to the beach for a stroll). To shoot the film elsewhere and call it Kasargod may be part of the strategy to deceive the audience and malign the non-BJP ruled state.

I said at the beginning of this blog that our pro-Hindutva anti-Islamic propaganda machine has already covered the length of India with The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story. What remains now is its breadth. So in the future, we can safely hope to see more such biased films set in the extreme west, say the Bhuj region, very close to the Pakistan border, and the extreme east, say the North East, perpetually embroiled in conflict. I can even anticipate their titles. The Gandhidham Papers. The Manipur Machinations. But like I said, isn’t it about time we called the bluff of makers of films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story?

I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide.