PM support for ‘Kerala Story’ shows need for Oppn Unity

Prem Shankar Jha

Barely a year after the release of  The Kashmir Files, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is again using  another grossly incendiary film, The  Kerala Story, to fan hatred of Indian Muslims  in order to consolidate the “Hindu” vote and  stay in power next year.

The Kashmir Files was a hugely distorted depiction of the planned murders of prominent Kashmiri Pandits in the early  months of 1990, which was designed to  ethnically cleanse the valley of its Pandit  community. The Kerala Story accuses Muslim organisations in Kerala of supplying 32,000 recruits to ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State terror group which briefly established control of territory in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, it claims, were women recruited to serve as the wives of IS fighters.

The brazen disregard for the truth displayed by both films reflects how completely the BJP, under Modi, has become a conduit for lies. For, one brief look at the actual Kashmir files – not the screen version but the Union home ministry’s papers – would reveal that the killing of selected Pandits in 1990 was planned and paid for, in weapons and cash, by the Pakistan army’s ISI and carried out by a handful of self-styled mujahideen recruited by it from among the many thousand young Kashmiris who had joined the rebellion against India after the Gaukadal police firing upon civilians in Srinagar in January 1990 that took between 24 and 55 lives.

 How opposed the average Kashmiri Muslim was to becoming a part of Pakistan, even after the 14 years insurgency and draconian repression that followed, was revealed by two international opinion polls carried out in 2004 and 2009. The first was conducted by MORI, Europe’s premier sampling survey organisation, and the second jointly by MORI with GALLUP. The 2004 poll showed that 61% of the population of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh wanted to remain a part of India and only 6% preferred Pakistan.

Similarly, the 2009 poll, which was initiated by Chatham House, Britain’s premier foreign policy think tank, and confined to the Kashmir valley, showed that even in the four worst affected districts of the valley, only 2.5 to 7.5% of those surveyed preferred Pakistan to India.

 That was the strength of the bond between Kashmiri Muslims and secular India that Modi fatally weakened within weeks of coming to power by breaking off all talks with the Hurriyat Conference, unleashing a reign of terror in the valley, gutting Article 370 of the Constitution, and turning Jammu and Kashmir into a Union territory, thereby disempowering Kashmiris within their own state. That is the bond that The Kashmir Fileshas weakened further by creating alienation not in Kashmir but in the Hindu population of the rest of India.

The Kerala Story is intended to do the same to the 1,200 year-old bond between the Hindus, Christians and Muslims of Kerala. It is a measure of Prime Minister Modi’s insecurity about his party’s – and his own – future that he is now openly endorsing the grotesque lie cooked up by his bhakts and his propaganda machine that there was an exodus of Muslims from Kerala to join Daesh, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

What is the theme of The Kerala Story that Modi is asking the people of Karnataka and the rest of India to treat as gospel? It is that Muslim organisations in Kerala supplied 32,000 recruits to ISIS when it established its brief, blood-soaked control of territory in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, claims, were sent to serve as wives for the IS fighters. What is far more incendiary, the film depicts in graphic detail how many of them were Hindu girls who had been converted to Islam before being inveigled into going.

Several reviewers, who did not bother to do the 30 minutes of research on the internet that has gone into the writing of this article, have stated that this is “a serious issue lost to bad direction, and worse writing” (India Today).The Organiser, the de facto mouthpiece of the RSS, has described the film as “a dangerous truth told with a calculated balance”.

But the entire film is such a bald-faced lie that to find the prime minister of India mouthing its praise and endorsing its contents in a public speech brings shame upon the entire country. Study after study, both in India and abroad, has noted the almost complete absence of Indian Muslims in the ranks of the IS. On December 20, 2017, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, Modi’s minister of state for home affairs in his first stint as PM, reported to the Rajya Sabha that only 103 people who “sympathised” with ISIS had been arrested across 14 states by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), according to the data available with the government. The minister added: “Very few individuals [from India] h