After watching the teaser of ‘The Kerala Story’, Tamil Nadu journalist Aravindakshan BR wrote a letter to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, requesting the government to contact the director of the movie and investigate its veracity.
In the teaser, a character claims that 32,000 girls from Kerala were being forcibly converted to Islam before joining the terrorist organisation ISIS. The teaser was released on November 3, on the Sunshine Pictures YouTube channel, according to Aravindakshan.
“Produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, Directed by Sudipto Sen, the teaser depicts the heart-wrenching story of 32,000 women from Kerala who were radicalized to join ISIS (Islamic Iraq and Syria) terrorist groups,” read the journalist’s letter, according to the ANI.
Furthermore, Aravindakshan has also written to Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur and Secretary Apurva Chandra, asking them to verify the content. He has stated that it is imperative that the Union government investigate the source of information from which the movie was derived. According to his letter, the teaser shows a Muslim woman standing at an international border.
“In the character played by actress Adha Sharma, she says that she used to be Shalini Unnikrishnan and wanted to serve people as a nurse. She says she was forcibly converted to Islam and renamed Fatima Ba, then joined ISIS and later imprisoned in Afghanistan,” added the letter. Aravindakshan claimed that it was a “true story set in Kerala” in the teaser, which portrayed it as a terrorist state.
In addition, he said that the release of the movie in cinema theatres or on OTT with “false information” would have bad consequences on the Indian society, which would be detrimental to the country’s unity and sovereignty. Accordingly, the journalist requested that the Kerala government contact and ask Sudipto Sen, the director of the movie, about the sources from which the teaser was derived.
According to a recent inquiry, approximately 32,000 girls from the Hindu and Christian communities in Kerala and Mangaluru have converted to Islam since 2009. The majority of these girls end up in Afghanistan, Syria, and other regions, with a high concentration of ISIS and Haqqani influence. The movie, which potentially aims to reveal the truth about this scheme and the suffering of these women, will be screened next year.
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