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05-05-2023
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ KOZHIKODE, KERALA: A cash reward of 10 million rupees ($122,280) has been announced by a Muslim group in India’s Kerala state for providing evidence of claims made in an Indian film that thousands of Hindu and Christian women from the state were recruited into the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.
Members of the Muslim Youth League, affiliated with the opposition Indian Union Muslim League party, set up what they call “evidence collection counters” in all 14 districts of Kerala on Thursday, a day before the film is due to be released in the Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu languages.
According to the film’s trailer on YouTube, The Kerala Story, produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah and directed by Sudipto Sen, claims to depict the “lives of innocent girls trapped, transformed and trafficked for terror” from Kerala.
“A spine-chilling, never told before true story revealing a dangerous conspiracy that has been hatched against India,” the text below the trailer says.
The filmmakers say the 138-minute film is a “compilation of true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”.
An earlier figure that was included in the text was that 32,000 girls were forced to join ISIL, a claim that is being challenged by Muslim and other groups as well as opposition political parties in Kerala and other parts of India.
“If 32,000 Hindu girls have joined ISIS from the state that amounts to 10 girls from every village in the state. How can anyone miss it?” Muslim Youth League general secretary PK Firos asked.
Makers of the The Kerala Story allude to the Hindu right-wing conspiracy theory of “love jihad” to back up their claims in the film. They say the film shows true stories of a Muslim “love jihad” plot, in which non-Muslim girls and women are supposedly romanced, lured to convert to Islam through marriage and then forced to join ISIL.
This plot is central to the film despite India’s junior home minister telling parliament in 2020 that there is no such thing as “love jihad” and government investigations have dismissed the allegations.
The filmmakers say the inspiration behind their film is a real woman named Nimisha, who converted to Islam in 2015 and married Bestin Vincent, another convert. The couple travelled to Afghanistan via Sri Lanka the next year to join ISIL, according to Indian officials.
In 2021, India declined to repatriate four Indians who had joined ISIL fighters in Afghanistan. Nimisha was among those seeking to return home after her husband was killed. Indian media reports say she has a daughter and both are in an Afghan prison.
