The Kerala Story is now banned in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal. Stalin’s Tamil Nadu too has decided not to show it in its theatres. The ‘liberals’ across the country are up in arms — not against the banning of the film in the two states, but against the film itself, calling it an assault on Muslims. One senior journalist, whom Rahul Gandhi had not long ago complimented publicly in a press conference for forwarding his side of the story, said the film “smacks of propaganda”. Interestingly, the same journalist had not very long ago recommended people to watch Parzania, based on the plight of a Parsi family during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Victimhood has a religion, especially in India’s elite Left-‘liberal’ ecosystem.
First and foremost, banning a film, whether Pathaan, Padmaavat, Parzania or The Kerala Story, isn’t a sign of a matured democracy, far less an evolved society. The state banning it just because it finds its content uncomfortable is still understandable, given the political class’ tendency to get edgy when confronted with inconvenient truths. But the same cannot — and should not — be expected of the Left-‘liberal’ class. The latter’s silence — worse, muted support — to the state high-handedness in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu is both unfortunate and dangerous.
The premise of The Kerala Story is hardly a revelation. Historically, from Mohammed bin Qasim’s invasion onwards, there has been a constant Islamist endeavour “to kill all males, especially those capable of bearing arms, and enslave their hapless women”, as eminent historian KS Lal wrote in one of his essays. True to their learnings, the contemporary Islamists too look for non-Muslim women to “enslave them for jihad”. Since it’s no longer easier to raid and capture these women and girls, they now take recourse to love.
There are numerous reports worldwide of non-Muslim girls being converted via “love jihad” — and after conversion, they are pushed towards terror or terror-related activities. Whether through the ‘Grooming Gang’ in the UK or via ‘love jihad’ in India, the Islamist template is similar: Brainwashing young girls, most of whom are still in their teens, to convert to Islam and then become a tool for the radical Islamists to orchestrate terrorism. Girls with a difficult past are easy to lure, and so are those hailing from families that have been obsessively secular enough to uproot their children of their own religio-cultural past. It’s in this vacuum that these Islamists thrive.
Coming back to the ‘liberals’, by turning into an apologist to Islamism and its regressive worldview, they have themselves become a threat to the modern, democratic order. What they don’t realise is that by doing so they are not just legitimising the Islamist violence but also emboldening the very regressive forces that challenge the liberal order. As Pallavi Aiyar quotes Manzour Ahmad, a 61-year-old Islamic scholar in Brussels, in her book, Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis, “Europeans have become victims of their own laws. It’s impossible for them to stop the Muslims now. They have cut off their own arms with all these rights. Human rights and women’s rights and immigrants’ rights.” When Aiyar asked what he would have done had he been a European policymaker, pat came the reply: “I would change their laws to stop all this immigration.”
It is this liberal proclivity to turn a blind eye to growing Islamist assertion in the West that has Douglas Murray come up with a book, The Strange Death of Europe, which poignantly explains how “Europe is in the process of committing suicide”, thanks to its leaders blindly pursuing policies that pander to Islamists in the name of liberalism, multiculturalism, et al. Murray is unsparing in announcing Europe’s obituary which if its leaders don’t mend their ways would be possible “by the end of the life-spans of most people currently alive in Europe”.
The Indian liberal, being an ideological descendant of his European counterpart, too is bent on committing the same harakiri. He reports on missing Indian girls, mostly from Kerala. He also concedes that these girls are lured into Islam and then forced to join ISIS or such jihadi outfits. But when a film is made on the issue, he gets wary. He calls it a figment of Hindutva imagination, though it is the Church in Kerala that has been aggressively campaigning against such conversions. In 2020, for instance, the Syro-Malabar Church, one of the largest church bodies in Kerala, had released a statement, claiming Christian women were becoming “victims of love jihad”.
In fact, the murmurs of love jihad were first heard in Kerala more than a decade ago. In 2009, the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council had claimed that more than 4,500 girls in the state have been converted to Islam, calling the phenomenon ‘love jihad’ or ‘Romeo jihad’. A year later, this accusation got official legitimacy when VS Achuthanandan, the then communist chief minister of the state, talked about the sinister Islamist plan to “make Kerala a Muslim state in the next 20 years” by “luring youngsters, offering them money and insisting that they marry Hindu girls to increase the Muslim population”. In 2012, Oomen Chandy, the then Congress chief minister of Kerala, said that among those converted to Islam between 2009 and 2012, as many as 2,667 were young women of which 2,195 were Hindus and 492 were Christians. Even the Kerala High Court conceded in 2009 that there was a “concerted effort” by certain outfits to convert women; there had been 3,000-4,000 such conversions in the past four years, it added.
The Hindutva charge against The Kerala Story also falls flat given the fact that this is not the first time a film has been made on the issue. From the 1991 American drama Not Without My Daughter and Britain’s Jihadi Brides (2015) to Netflix’s Caliphate (2020) to the 2016 French film Heaven Will Wait (Le Ciel attendra), there are many films on the subject. Just like so many young, impressionable girls from Britain and France, among other European countries, joined ISIS, several young Indian women too joined this jihad in West Asia. Given that so many people had been lured into conversion in India, it was only a matter of time that The Kerala Story was made.
Equally ludicrous, if not utterly disturbing, is the Left-‘liberal’ narrative to hyphenate Islamism with Islam, and ISIS with Muslims at large. Why would the Muslim community per se take offence to the showcasing of Islamist/ISIS wrongdoings in a film? As Abhijit Majumder writes in his Firstpost article (https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-kerala-story-is-not-hindutva-fiction-world-is-waking-up-to-love-jihad-and-grooming-12555032.html), “If the Congress and the ‘seculars’ attacking Hindutva is not an attack on Hindus, how is the RSS and the BJP exposing Islamist conversions and ISIS activities in Kerala or the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits anti-Muslim?”
One can, however, understand the apprehension among the elite liberal class in India, which, in reality, has predominantly been closet Leftist. Some of them are Stalinists as well. As one is reminded of Stalin, his “whisperers” come to mind. In his book, The Whisperers, British historian Orlando Figes explores the terrorised lives of ordinary people in Stalin’s Russia — a world where people were so afraid to talk that they spoke in whispers. With first The Kashmir Files and now The Kerala Story, India’s dark secrets are tumbling out of the Left-‘liberal’ closet, to be finally discussed and debated in the open. People, finally overcoming the fear of Left-liberal ostracisation, are no longer talking about Kashmir and Kerala in whispers. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the old Left-liberal stranglehold that has blighted most of independent India. The public response to The Kerala Story, just like The Kashmir Files last year, affirms to that change.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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