A new film, “The Kerala Story”, exploits the real-life radicalisation of a handful of Keralite Muslims to propagate a right-wing Hindu conspiracy theory known as “love jihad”
for the most part kept free of India’s scourge of Hindi-Muslim conflict. With its liberal values,and celebrity Hindu-Muslim marriages, the Hindi film industry has in some ways been a powerful antidote to it. A heavily politicised row over a low-budget and allegedly Islamophobic film called “The Kerala Story”, which was released this month, suggests that record of tolerance is in jeopardy.
It began even before the recent release of the film, which is about a fictitious Hindu woman who converted to Islam and was then radicalised. A marketing trailer for the film claimed that 32,000 girls from the southern state of Kerala had been forcibly converted to Islam then joined jihadist groups in Syria and Yemen. This was a gross exaggeration.
from enthusiastically championing the film. While campaigning for Karnataka’s recent election, India’s prime minister claimed it had exposed “a new form of terrorism”.chief minister of Assam wrote in a tweet that: “Everyone should see this film with their daughters”. Opposition leaders meanwhile condemned it. The communist chief minister of Kerala dubbed the film a product of the “Sangh Parivar”, a group of right-wing Hindu organisations. In Tamil Nadu, cinemas pulled it.
“The Kerala Story” exploits the real-life radicalisation of a handful of Keralite Muslims to propagate a right-wing Hindu conspiracy theory known as “love jihad”, in which virile Muslim men prey upon innocent young non-Muslim women. Such Hindu conspiracies, whipped up bypoliticians, have led to an uptick in attacks on non-Hindus, as reported this month in America’s State Department’s latest annual report on religious freedom.
Another divisive Hindi film, “The Kashmir Files”, a pro-Hindu account of Kashmir’s ongoing tragedy that was released last year, allegedly incited some of that violence. It, too, was heavily touted by Mr Modi and his party. “The Kerala Story”, now playing in almost 1,500 cinemas in India and more abroad, therefore represents a worrying trend: a growing collaboration between Mr Modi’s chauvinist politics and Indian popular culture.
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