The plot of the upcoming film The Kerala Story 2 revolves around the two-decade-old conspiracy theory about a Jihadist scheme to marry Hindu women and convert them to Islam. The first film in 2023, which claimed that 32,000 women had been converted by Jihadists in Kerala, was hauled up by the Supreme Court for putting out fake data.
Even though the premise of the sequel remains the same, the producers claim that this time they have spent seven months on “research”.
For months, we have been researching religious conversions in Kerala and have uncovered remarkable facts.
It turns out that Hinduism has been attracting the largest number of converts in Kerala – not Christianity or Islam. Our earlier story in the series pointed to the existence of a statewide network of Hindutva groups, including the Vishva Hindu Parishad, focused on converting Dalits to Hinduism.
Read: Hindu on paper, Christian at heart: What lies behind Dalit conversions in Kerala
We sifted through more than 10,000 pages of the Kerala Gazette to find that 365 Keralites converted to Hinduism between January and December 2024. Of these, 262 were Dalit Christians and Muslims, many of them induced by the promise of securing the Scheduled Caste status upon conversion to Hinduism.