My first question is, why is the film titled The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond? It is a misguiding and wrong title for a film in which of the three female protagonists, Hindu, and victims of the entire narrative, only one is a Kerala girl preparing for her UPSC exams. The other two are from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. “Goes Beyond” what? The fake stories of forced conversions unspooled in The Kerala Story? The inhuman torture and gruesome caging of the three unsuspecting young girls who fell in love with three young men without even guessing their intentions? And what, exactly, pray their intentions were? Only conversion? Or, prostitution for huge amounts of money, more if the girl was a Hindu Brahmin and less if she came from a lower caste? Why is conversion necessary to run a prostitution racket?

The teenaged girl Divya from Rajasthan who is crazy about performing erotic dances for video and has an increasing number of hits wishes to run away because her mother is against her erotic dances in skimpy dresses for mobile videos. She is not really in love with Faizan. She runs away with him just to free herself from her parents but is reduced to severe torture by her husband who breaks down her microphone and says “no reels in our family.” When she is pregnant, in he walks with his second wife, younger than Divya and originally a Hindu.

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The javelin thrower young girl from Madhya Pradesh with her father as her coach, falls in love with a Muslim boy who shows keen interest in her sport and promises to back her in her attempts to compete at the Nationals. Soon, he breaks her javelin sticks and commands her to stop dreaming and begin to live like a pious, Muslim wife. She is reduced to prostitution while her husband pockets the earnings. Don’t many non-Muslim young men behave identically?

Surekha, the girl from Kerala is the strongest in her revolt against being forced to live with a co-wife, a Muslim who treats her like dirt and forces her to eat beef which she throws up at once. Her husband, already married, literally keeps her in under lock and key. Salim is discovered to be heading a gang of Islamic terrorists who he promises will turn India completely under Sharia’ power by 2047. Why the forced conversion which Surekha adamantly refuses to bend to?

The “conversion” angle trying to show that every young Muslim is hell-bent on conversion is completely wrong. It is also quite unconvincing. Salim, Surekha’s husband who eloped with her without telling her that he is Muslim is the sole man who is interested in conversion. Among the other two, one is a pimp and the other is a cheat and a wife-batterer.

According to the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5, 2019-21), about 31.42% of Hindu women reported experiencing intimate partner violence (physical, sexual, or emotional). According to a Benares Hindu University study, women from Scheduled Castes (SC) are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence across all religions, with reports as high as 36.2% among Hindu SC women. Women whose husband/partner is uneducated are more exposed to domestic violence (Hindu 42.2%, Muslim 37.4% and Christian 27.1%) as compared to those whose husband/partner have Higher education (Hindu 20%, Muslim 17.7%, Christian 15.8%) among all the three religions.

Popular culture through films such as The Kerala Story (2023) Islam sort of encourages women to uphold their honour even if it means spitting on a father lying unconscious in a hospital during a heart attack brought upon on hearing that his only daughter, Geetanjali, has embraced Islam! Or, when Shalini/Fatima casually but deliberately places her feet on the table where her mother has placed the pooja thali with a smile. These are not political films. Let us see how and why.

The three young women in The Kerala Story featured as the primary victims, belong to Kerala, which, according to the 2011 Census, has the highest literacy rate among females. The literacy rate among males is 96.11 while among females, it is 91.07. These three attractive young women are educated, can speak, read and write in English and are intelligent enough to get themselves enrolled in a college for nursing. Then how can these three young women, finally two and not three, get so thoroughly brainwashed that even their parents cannot recognize the electric metamorphosis in them?

Why Kerala? Because it is a Marxist State that does not toe the Hindu Right line? It is shocking to accept that relatively new actors like Adah Sharma and her peers have at agreed to portray such terribly debased and immoral characters in a film that openly pretends to be based on the truth but soon after withdraws by cutting down the earlier figure of 32000 girls missing to just three girls? But this is a commercial film pretending to be based on the truth so why must we blame the actors? But the women they have portrayed are certainly without brains. Whoever would be convinced that hijab protects all girls and women from rape and molestation? How then, does Asifa justify the sex slavery imposed on these converted girls by ISIS terrorists? The Kerala Story is insulting to women and girls per se and leave alone this Hindu Right propaganda against these minorities. The film spreads a very patriarchal and fascist message to everyone watching the film and it is insulting to show two Hindu girls stupid enough to be brainwashed by a slip of a girl who is just Muslim and nothing more.

The Tashkent Files is an intriguing film because though you are entertained with what appears like a political thriller, you are constantly on edge trying to fathom whether the entire film is a “fake” film. More so when you come to the end of the film which clearly states, on a screen resembled to look like a sheet of parchment paper that the story we have just seen has absolutely no documentary evidence to corroborate the incidents and the reports. And what have we just seen? This is the ‘revelation’ that Lal Bahadur Shastri who died in Tashkent on January 11, 1966 did not die of natural causes but was poisoned. Really?

In The dangerous ‘truth’ of The Kashmir Files posted in Al Jazeera, (13th April 2022) Sanjay Kak, a Kashmiri Pandit who made the documentary film, Jashn-e-Azaadi, faced severe obstacles during screening in several cities. Kak insists, “A few days after The Kashmir Files was released, it received an unusual stamp of approval. “All of you should watch it,” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a meeting of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) parliamentary group. “The film has shown the truth which has been suppressed for years. The truth prevailed in Kashmir Files,” Modi said. This resounding endorsement of the film’s claim to the truth, as well as the suggestion that this truth had been suppressed in the past, was an early marker of the political capital that was being invested in the film.”

Sanjay Kak details that in the decade that followed, Kashmir continued to be wracked by mass protests as well as a full-blown armed uprising that aimed at nothing less than freedom from India. The brutal counter-insurgency that followed was to overwhelm life for all those who lived in Kashmir, and the violence and continuing fear led to steady departures of its Pandit minority, and also of a significant number of Muslims. We know that the final waves of Kashmiri Pandit departures followed two horrific massacres – of 23 civilians at Wandhama in 1998 and of 24 men, women and children at Nadimarg in 2003.

How many Kashmiri Pandits were killed in the conflict? asks Kak. In conversations around The Kashmir Files, the figure has hovered around 4,000, although the most recent figures provided by the region’s police department put it at 89. Earlier official estimates had said 270, while Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, a Kashmir-based citizens group, had arrived at about 700. When did they leave? And that most vexed of all: what were the circumstances that made people leave? None of these can be answered with any degree of certainty.

Derived from Latin and meaning to spread or propagate, the word “propaganda films” in contemporary times, spells out what is unabashedly a pro-government film, or, maybe, if one may be permitted to say so, a pro-Bharatiya Janata Party film. The films discussed above are just the tip of a huge iceberg that is getting deeper with every passing day. What about films like Godse, The Sabarmati Report, Veer Savarkar, and many more? Propaganda films take away cinema’s three-fold functions of education, information and entertainment completely. Because these films do not recreate and fictionalize history, but actually make and fake history.

© Mathrubhumi English