Bollywood is lost. The Hindi film industry needs to take a hard look in the mirror. It resembles a mishmash of lost souls and the hustle of their extremely large and wealthy egos, all without plan. Kerala, an Indian state proud of its multi-religious and multi-ethnic identity, has now become the nutritional diet of hate mongers. A new fabricated story is now making the rounds in the media. The media screens are again buzzing with the fabricated story and sparking fresh controversy in the name of the recently screened movie ‘The Kerala Story’.
The filmmakers, director Sudipto Sen and creative producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah, insist that their film is based on the supposed “true story of 32,000 young women” from Kerala who were held captive in ISIS camps on the border of Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria after having been converted to Islam.
The Kerala story’s plot
The movie’s plot follows the story of a group of women from Kerala who are converted to Islam forcefully and go on to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Adah Sharma, the protagonist, plays the character of Fatima Ba, a Hindu Malayali nurse who converted to Islam and then forcefully joined ISIS before ending up in a prison in Afghanistan. She identifies as one of the “32,000 girls” (this number, mentioned in the description box of the film’s trailer on YouTube, has now been changed to three) from the Hindu-Christian communities who are allegedly missing from Kerala and have been recruited into the Islamic State after being converted to Islam.
The movie claims to be based on real events, “uncovering the truth that was kept hidden,” as written in the movie’s caption.
The movie’s most controversial claim
The film claims that approximately 32,000 girls have gone “missing” from Kerala, putatively after being forcefully converted to Islam and then recruited by the ISIS.
While director Sudipto Sen has claimed that he has evidence for this claim, so far he has not publicly shared it. In an interview on the YouTube channel ‘Festival of Bharat’, Sen claims that in 2010, then chief minister Oommen Chandy tabled a report on the floor of the Kerala Assembly that said “every year approximately 2800–3200 girls were being converted to Islam”. Sen says in the interview, “Just calculate this number for ten years, and that gives you 32,000 to 33,000 girls,” the number quoted in his film. According to Sen, Chandy denied these figures when Sen questioned him, but he has “the document” to prove his claim. The Indian Express writes.
While media channels were unable to locate any 2010 document that mentions the figures quoted by Sen. As for the figures portrayed in the trailer for the movie, 32,000 missing women are nothing but misinformation. If 32,000 women have gone missing from a state in a decade’s time, the integrity and efficiency of several authorities and agencies in the nation should be questioned. This narrative may apparently seem to defame Kerala, but in fact it defames the Prime Minister and the Central Home Ministry because this large number of people can never move out of the country unnoticed and unscrutinized. Alt News, the Indian fact-checking news website, said in a report that there was “no evidence” to back this big claim[1].
In the fact chasing of this arbitrary number of 32,000 missing women, Alt News found a 2012 India Today report that said, “On June 25, Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy informed the state legislature that 2,667 young women converted to Islam in the state since 2006” (that is, from 2006 to 2012). There is no mention in the report of women joining ISIS. The report added that Chandy had said there was no evidence for forced conversions in the state and that the fears about love jihad were baseless. The New Indian Express also quoted Chandy and mentioned the same data. None of the reports talked about any annual figure cited by the former CM, as claimed by Sen. When Alt News shared the India Today report with Sudipto Sen and requested him to share the said ‘TOI report’ or other sources that he might have, with us, Sen said over a WhatsApp message, “Let the intolerance reach a crescendo. I’ll share my data after the film is released. Why should I defeat the cause of my film?”
The number used in The Kerala Story is not the first groundless claim by filmmaker Sudipto Sen. But in 2018, Sen made a 52-minute documentary titled ‘In the Name of Love!”[2] In the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the plot reads, “As per a recent report, since 2009, more than 17 thousand girls from Kerala and more than 15 thousand girls from Mangalore from Hindu and Christian communities have been converted to Islam, and most of them ended up landing in Syria, Afghanistan, and other ISIS and Taliban-influenced areas.” Interestingly, the figure of 32,000 (17000+15000) shows up here as well. A screening of the film at JNU resulted in a scuffle between two groups of students.
After the chaos at JNU over his film, he said in a statement to The Print, “First of all, let me clarify that I do not belong to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I come from a Communist family and do not believe in ‘love jihad’, a concept that is even being propagated by the likes of UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath. And this is exactly what I wanted to show through my film”.
Interestingly, last year, Sen was on the jury of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), whose chairperson was Nadav Lapid, who said at the closing ceremony that The Kashmir Files was a “propaganda” movie. Sen was the first jury member to distance himself from Lapid’s comments.
ISIS recruitment from Kerala
The biggest claim of the movie is that not only did 32,000 girls from Kerala convert to Islam; they also went “missing”, and were allegedly recruited by the Islamic state to serve as so-called “Jihadi fighters.”
The IS has long had India in its sights as part of its so-called “Khorasan Caliphate”. The terrorist group belonging to ISIS first came on the radar of Indian intelligence agencies in 2013, after reports from Syria suggested there were some Indians in the ranks of the IS fighters, who were then making military and territorial gains there.
In 2019, then Minister of State for Home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy told Parliament in a written reply that “the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the state police forces have registered cases against ISIS operatives and sympathisers and have arrested 155 accused from across the country so far.”
Also, a 2019 report by the Observer Research Foundation said, “India was thought of by analysts to be fertile ground for the recruitment of foreign fighters for the Islamic State (IS).” ” The country, however, has proven such analysts wrong by having only a handful of pro-IS cases so far.”
According to a US State Department report titled ‘Country Reports on Terrorism 2020: India,” “There were 66 known Indian-origin fighters affiliated with ISIS as of November” (2020).
The ORF report cited above noted that the majority of India’s IS recruits came from Kerala, with the state accounting for “40 of the 180 to 200 cases” across the country. According to the intelligence agencies reports, they are working in the Gulf or have come back from there with an already developed liking for the IS’s extreme ideology.
The four girls whose stories the movie portrays
In December 2019, interviews of four women from Kerala, namely Nimisha Alias, Fathima Isa, Merin Alias Mirriam, Sonia Sebastian Alias Ayisha, and Rafaella, were published under the title “Khorasan Files: The Journey of Indian Islamic State Widows’ by the website StratNewsGlobal.
The filmmaker uses these four stories to paint a large canvas of ISIS recruitment in Kerala.
Anand Matthew, a Delhi-based script consultant, writes about the film, The pragmatism of everyday politics in Kerala necessitates that political parties go the extra mile to ensure that the fruits of development reach all regions and cross-sections of the populace, irrespective of religion. If the makers of the film had taken the trouble to visit the districts of Kerala, they would have come across large numbers of women in strong leadership positions spread across panchayats and municipalities. There are so many other stories that define Kerala. The real Kerala story is about the upcoming Malayalam release, 2018: Everyone is a Hero, directed by Jude Anthany Joseph, which is coincidentally opening this week. The film looks at the weave of humanity that came together as one during the “once in a century” floods that hit the state five years ago. The real Kerala story was about Arikomban, the rice-loving behemoth of a tusker that was safely captured last week with the help of four other trained captive elephants that increasingly had the state on edge. Sen’s film is just an unreal blip in the steady stream of Bollywood narratives that saunter to a nearby cinema hall every week. Watch it if you want or skip it; either choice is a harmless one and only ours to make.
Kerala is chosen as a chess piece to tarnish its reputation with dirty Bollywood politics, or maybe the filmmakers and actors are trying to rescue their drowning careers, as the names associated with The Kerala Story were unheard until now.
Peace is a living prerequisite for any nation. Trying to divide minds and people in order to achieve some dirty goals will obviously lead a nation towards destruction on all fronts.
The Author is currently pursuing M.Sc in Chemistry from University of Allahabad.
Reference links:
[1]https://www.altnews.in/32000-kerala-women-in-isis-misquotes-flawed-math-imaginary-figures-behind-filmmakers-claim/
[2]https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8286934/?ref_=ttpl_ov/ documentry by Sudipto sen titled In the name of Love.
Additional links:
https://youtu.be/iP2o1ZxrTzM/ Exclusive interview/Sudipto sen/The Free press Journal
https://youtu.be/PbLii6HjTYk/ Citti media/full talk with Sudipto sen
