A public interest litigation petition has been filed in the Madras High Court for banning the multilingual movie The Kerala Story on the ground that it makes a baseless claim of 32,000 Hindu and Christian women from Kerala having been converted to Islam and made to join the ISIS terrorist movement.
A summer vacation Bench of Justices A.D. Jagadish Chandira and C. Saravanan is expected to hear on Thursday the petition filed by a journalist B.R. Aravindakshan. The litigant feared that, if released, the movie might stir communal passions and cause disturbance to public order.
The petitioner claimed that he had been taking all out efforts to prevent the release of the movie ever since filmmaker Vipul Amrutlal Shah released the teaser in November 2022. The teaser was released with the statement ‘Uncovering the truth that was kept hidden’ and it meant that the movie was based on true stories.
To know the veracity of such a claim, the petitioner had made an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005, to the Union Home Ministry on November 5, 2022, wanting to know year-wise data — from 2014 to 2022 — of Hindu women who had converted to Islam in Kerala and joined the IS terror organisation.
“The Home Ministry has replied on December 9, 2022, stating that ‘police and public order are State dependant.’ If that’s the case, it is clear that the Union Home Ministry has no consolidated information on the so called events in the film The Kerala Story,” he said, insisting that a movie with false propaganda must not be allowed to be released.
The litigant also claimed that the Central Board of Film Certification, too, in response to his another application under the RTI Act, had confirmed on March 16 this year that the movie’s teaser released on YouTube had not been issued with any censor certificate. Despite the absence of such certificate, the teaser had been watched by 9,03,600 viewers, the petitioner said.
The teaser had reached a much wider audience through social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. Further, the movie shatters the public confidence on the country’s intelligence agencies and portrays the State of Kerala as a supporter of terrorist activities, he said.
The petitioner told the court that a question was raised in the Rajya Sabha in 2017 to know the veracity of a claim that nearly 100 people from Kerala had joined the Islamic State. Replying to it, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said, very few individuals, who had joined the ISIS, had come to the notice of Central and State intelligence agencies.
Further, giving a break up, the Minister had said that 17 persons from Uttar Pradesh, 16 from Maharashtra, 16 from Telangana, 14 from Kerala, eight from Karnataka, six from Madhya Pradesh, five from Tamil Nadu, five from West Bengal, four from Uttarakhand, four from Rajasthan, four from Gujarat, two from Bihar, one from Delhi and one from Jammu and Kashmir had been arrested for being ISIS cadres/sympathisers.
In such a situation, the exaggerated claims made in the movie ‘ The Kerala Story’ would end up disturbing peace and tarnish the image of the Indian government, the petitioner said.
