Ignore any lofty claims about the Bollywood hit The Kerala Story: this film will only incite hatred against Muslims

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/01/bollywood-hit-kerala-story-islamophobic-bjp

Version 0 of 1.

The controversial film championed by the BJP is an Islamophobic fantasy

Two weeks after I was born in the curfewed town of Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, the Aligarh riots of 1990 broke out. What began as skirmishes exploded into widespread bloodletting after three leading Hindi daily newspapers published front-page headlines reporting the targeted killing of Hindus inside a hospital run by Muslims. Those killings turned out to be the fevered imaginings of two Hindu “eyewitnesses”. But the actual massacres ignited by this fake news eventually left about a hundred people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims.

A fortnight ago, I watched the new Bollywood hit The Kerala Story, in a rundown cinema in Delhi. The sluggish air conditioning seemed to have given up against the sultry May heat. A group of (largely) young Hindu men packed out the theatre. Occasionally, they broke out into passionate chants of “Jai Shri Ram”, the cry that often accompanies videos of “vigilante violence” committed against Muslims. Yet when they streamed out of the theatre, they looked more horrified than enraged, like sports fans numbed after their side has taken one beating after another. The rolling spectacle of an all-round “Hindu humiliation” – including graphic scenes depicting Hindu women being violently raped by Muslims – had lasted for more than two hours.

The Kerala Story claims to dramatically reconstruct the saga of a few young women who converted to Islam and subsequently fled with their husbands to the Islamic State’s enclaves of Afghanistan and Syria. Among the creative liberties taken by the producers is the deliberate misrepresentation of a handful of such cases (estimates range from four to 15) and the absurd claim that they represent the “gut-wrenching stories of 32,000 females”. That “big lie”, having no evidentiary basis and since excised from the official trailer, forms the heart of this Islamophobic fantasy that is playing out in theatres across the country.

Though the film has been attacked as dangerous “hate propaganda” by opposition politicians such as the chief minister of Kerala, and panned by critics, it has been championed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). The Kerala Story enjoys informal status as a kind of semi-official production of the ruling establishment, documenting the conspiratorial themes of “love jihad” and “rampant religious conversion”. Surveys suggest many Indians (53% respondents, according to a recent poll) now believe in the Islamophobic idea of “love jihad”: a sprawling conspiracy to convert innocent Hindu women to Islam by luring them into romantic entanglements with Muslim men. Multiple investigative agencies, including one under the central Modi government, have returned with no concrete evidence that the phenomenon exists.

The exhaustive publicity that mainstream news channels devoted to the film before its release appear to bear the fingerprints of the ruling establishment. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, banished any lingering doubts with his mention of the movie, barely hours after its release, during a campaign rally in the state of Karnataka. The film’s importance, he said, lay in its portrayal of a “new type” of terrorism where “guns, bombs and pistols” have been replaced by a conspiracy “which undermines society from within”. Modi emphasised the film’s allusion to the Congress party, the primary opposition, as “hand in glove with this terrorism”. Soon, BJP chief ministers lined up to hold special screenings of The Kerala Story and grant it tax-free status, which is usually reserved for films with educational importance.

The Kerala Story is indeed an important cultural artefact. But this is not because the film reveals anything worthwhile about the prosperous and progressive state of Kerala – the only major Indian state to have never voted in a BJP member of parliament. Instead, the film and its surrounding culture is a poignant self-portrait of a nation that has ingested a toxic brew of Hindu nationalism and is now descending into collective madness. A typically unhinged scene from the movie shows a converted Muslim woman fulfilling a “sacred religious duty” by spitting on the face of her Hindu father, as he lies in hospital recovering from a heart attack caused by the news of her religious conversion.

In Birmingham, Muslim activists have reportedly tried to stop the film’s screening. In Britain, you could legitimately argue that cancelling screenings would infringe the film-makers’ freedom of expression. In India, the same arguments carry a Kafkaesque humour. The political scientist Paul Brass, studying the Aligarh riots of 1990, concluded that the prominent city newspapers deliberately spread communal propaganda because they were part of an institutionally violent system. Similarly, the film is symptomatic of a state that is invested in the institutional production of Islamophobic bigotry.

The market for state-sanctioned hate speech is thriving in India. You can take your pick: stream the bloodlust of nightly news; browse through vigilante videos on rightwing social media channels; or listen to the exploding genre of Hindutva pop, christened by the German broadcaster DW as the “soundtrack of hate”. And occasionally, the country gets treated to a “Hindutva horror” blockbuster such as The Kerala Story. We are being encouraged to consume culture that incites hate. The consequences will be grave.

Asim Ali is an independent political researcher and columnist based in Delhi