The producer of the controversial film The Kerala Story, Vipul Amrutlal Shah, told the Kerala High Court on Friday, May 5 that the teaser of the film — which claimed that 32,000 girls from the state were forcibly converted and recruited to the Islamic terror outfit, ISIS — will be removed from their social media accounts. The division bench comprising Justice N Nagaresh and Justice Sophy Thomas, meanwhile, refused to stay the release of the film and declined to entertain the petition asking the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to assign it an ‘A’ certificate. The Supreme Court had also disposed of a similar plea on Thursday.
In the film’s teaser, which was first released in November 2022, actor Adah Sharma who plays the film’s central character Shalini Unnikrishnan is seen claiming that she is among the “32,000 girls who have already been converted and buried in the desert of Syria and Yemen.” Though the makers have been unable to produce any factual evidence to back the number ‘32,000’, the figure is also mentioned in the film, which was released on Friday. The film inaccurately claims that 32,000 is the official statistic of women who went missing after being forcibly converted to Islam, while “the real number is as big as 50,000”.
Meanwhile, noting that the CBFC has already certified the film for public viewing, the bench said it watched the trailer of the film and found it to contain nothing that offends any particular community. “What is there in the film against Islam,” Justice Nagaresh asked, adding that the film was only making allegations against the organisation ISIS.
Even though the film says it is “inspired by true events”, the film’s makers have added a disclaimer to the film saying it is a fictionalised version of the events, the bench stated, and pointed out that none of the petitioners have watched the film. “There is something called freedom of expression. They have artistic freedom,” Justice Nagaresh said.
Asserting that the The Kerala Story was a work of fiction, the court further remarked, “There are no ghosts or vampires. But there are [a] large number of movies showing the same.” The bench also stated that there are many movies in which Hindu sanyasis are shown as smugglers and rapists. “You may have seen such moves in Hindi and Malayalam. In Kerala, we are so secular. There was a movie where a poojari spit on an idol and no problem was created. It is a famous award-winning movie,” the bench further said, referring to celebrated writer MT Vasudevan Nair’s 1973 film Nirmalyam.