Condemning the ban on “The Kerala Story”, the Producers Guild of India on Tuesday said no one other than the Central Board of Film Certification has the right to decide whether or not a film should be released. The guild issued a statement a day after the West Bengal government ordered an immediate ban on the screening of the controversial film in the state to avoid “any incident of hatred and violence”.
Multiplexes across Tamil Nadu have also cancelled screenings of the controversial film from Sunday, citing law and order issues and poor public response. Meanwhile, some BJP-ruled states have made the viewing of the film tax free.
As the controversy heats up, here are all questions about the film and its various facets addressed:
Q: What is the Kerala Story About?
A: ‘The Kerala Story,’ directed by Sudipto Sen and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, stars Adah Sharma, Yogita Bihani, Sonia Balani, and Siddhi Idnani. The movie is about forced religious conversion and alleges that about 32,000 women in Kerala were converted to Islam and many were sent to ISIS-ruled Syria at the pinnacle of the terror group’s dominance. Following the release of the film’s trailer, a petition to the Supreme Court was filed seeking a stay of execution on the basis of “worst kind of hate speech” and “audio-visual propaganda.”
However, the filmmakers have rejected opponents’ claims, even though the initial description of the film from ‘32,000 women’ was changed to ‘three women’ later. In an interview, actor Adah Sharma, director Sudipto Sen, and producer Vipul Shah all said that the film “targets terrorists rather than the entire Muslim community,” as per a report by India Today.
Vipul Shah had told the publication, “we don’t want to get into the debate on the numbers, we want to talk about the issue. We want to bring notice to the human tragedy happening in Kerala and in India.”
Q: Is There Any Truth to the Claims Made in The Kerala Story?
A: The threat of ISIS recruitment from abroad, especially Britain, has been documented by some reports and papers. In India, the Islamic State has long sought to establish a “Khorasan Caliphate”. The terrorist organisation initially came to the attention of Indian intelligence authorities in 2013, when reports from Syria revealed that there were some Indians within the ranks of the IS combatants, who were then making military and territorial gains in Syria, as per a report by Indian Express.
Since then, numerous Indians have journeyed to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State, and approximately 100 of them have been apprehended by the authorities either on their way back from Syria or while preparing to join the fighters there, the report says. Many others have also been arrested for planning an assault in India after being inspired by the IS. In a written reply to Parliament in 2019, then-Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy stated that “the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and state police forces have registered cases against ISIS operatives and sympathisers, and have arrested 155 accused from across the country so far.”
The Indian security establishment has taken a cautious approach to the question of IS influence on Indians, the report says. Hundreds of IS recruits or potential recruits have been counselled, made to participate in a deradicalization process, and then released with a warning.
As per a 2016 report in the Guardian which documented incidents of groups allegedly being recruited from Kerala by the IS, said that as per most estimations, India’s Muslim population had supplied negligible people to Isis. “More have gone from Britain, even the Maldives, than from India,” Vikram Sood, former chief of RAW had told the public agency at the time. But the US embassy in Delhi had issued its first Isis-related warning that year, of an “increased threat to places in India frequented by Westerners, such as religious sites, markets, and festival venues.” Read more on this here
Q: What About Such Recruitments from the West?
A: The threat of ISIS recruitment from abroad, especially UK, has been documented by some reports and papers. As per a 2015 Guardian report, in which author Nabeelah Jaffer talked to women on what had attracted them into the lure of IS, there were an estimated 500 plus western women who had travelled to Syria to join Isis. But she said there were more sitting at their computers at home, ‘voicing their support online’.
One of the highly-discussed of a possible trafficking case from the UK is of Shamima Begum. The 24-year-old is a British-born woman who entered Syria at the age of 15 to join the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). She was a pupil at London’s Bethnal Green Academy when she and two classmates, known as the Bethnal Green trio, fled to Syria in February 2015. Begum married a fellow ISIL member 10 days after arriving and had three children, all of whom perished while they were young. According to the Daily Telegraph, Begum had earned a reputation as an enforcer among other ISIL members and had attempted to persuade other young women to join the organisation. You can read more about the case here
There are also a series based on the case, called Caliphate.
Q: What are some Other Shows, Films that Document Similar Accounts?
A: Acclaimed director Hogir Hirori directed, photographed, and edited the 2021 Swedish documentary film Sabaya. It follows a group of people who put their lives in danger to save sex slaves held captive by ISIS in Al-Hawl.
Caliphate is a Swedish television thriller drama series. It broadcast on Sveriges Television on January 12, 2020. The plot is inspired on the true incident of the Bethnal Green trio, three young girls from London who were approached by jihad recruiters at their school in February 2015. Read about more such films here
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