How accurate are the claims made by ‘The Kerala Story’? (2024)

The film, whose trailer was released last week, is scheduled to open in theatres on May 5. It is directed by Sudipto Sen and produced by Vipul Amrutul Shah. The film stars Adah Sharma, Yogita Bihani, Sonia Balani, and Siddhi Idnani.

Since the trailer dropped, it has been the subject of fierce online debate and criticism, with many claiming that its story is completely fabricated. Others have claimed that it sheds light on the much-ignored story of forced conversions in Kerala.

The Kerala Story’s plot

The film’s plot follows the story of a group of women from Kerala who are converted to Islam (through force or deceit) and go on to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Adah Sharma plays the character of Fathima Ba – a Hindu Malayali nurse who converted to Islam – and then joined the ISIS, before ending up in an Afghan jail. She identifies as one of the “32,000 girls” (this number, mentioned in the description box of the film’s trailer on YouTube, has now been changed to three) from the Hindu and Christian communities who are allegedly missing from Kerala and have been recruited into the Islamic State after being converted to Islam.

The film claims to be based on real events with its caption saying “Uncovering the truth that was kept hidden”.

However, the film’s claims seem to have little evidence to back them up.

Arriving at the 32,000 number

The film’s most controversial claim thus far has been that approximately 32,000 girls have gone ‘missing’ from the southern state, allegedly after being forcefully/deceitfully converted to Islam and then recruited by the Islamic State.

While director Sudipto Sen has claimed that he has evidence for this claim, so far, he has not publicly shared it. In an interview on YouTube channel ‘Festival of Bharat’, Sen claims that in 2010, then chief minister Oommen Chandy tabled a report on the floor of the Kerala Assembly that said “every year approximately 2800-3200 girls were being converted to Islam”. Sen says in the interview, “just calculate this number for ten years and that gives you 32,000 to 33,000 girls” – the number quoted in his film. According to Sen, Chandy denied these figures when Sen questioned him, but he has “the document” to prove his claim.

The Indian Express was unable to locate any 2010 document that mentions the figures quoted by Sen.

Incidentally, Sen was part of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) jury last year, whose chairperson Nadav Lapid at the closing ceremony said that The Kashmir Files was a “propaganda” movie. Sen was the first jury member to distance himself from Lapid’s comments.

ISIS recruitment from Kerala

A bigger claim is that not only did 32,000 girls from Kerala convert to Islam, they also went “missing”, and were allegedly recruited by the Islamic state to serve as jihadi fighters.

The IS has long had India in its sights as part of its so called “Khorasan Caliphate”. The terrorist group first came on the radar of Indian intelligence agencies in 2013, after reports from Syria suggested there were some Indians in the ranks of the IS fighters, who were then making military and territorial gains there.

Since then, several Indians have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the IS, and about 100 of them have been arrested by the agencies either on their return from Syria, or while preparing to join the fighters there. Many have also been arrested for preparing to carry out an attack in India after being inspired by the IS.

In 2019, then Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy told Parliament in a written reply that “the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the state police forces have registered cases against ISIS operatives and sympathisers, and have arrested 155 accused from across the country so far”.

The Indian security establishment has approached the issue of IS influence on Indians with caution. Scores of IS recruits or potential recruits have been counselled, made to go through a deradicalisation programme, and let off with a warning.

The approach is informed by the fact that compared with the size of India’s Muslim population, which is behind only Indonesia’s and Pakistan’s in size, the number of Indian recruits in the IS has been minuscule.

A 2019 report by the Observer Research Foundation said, “India was thought of by analysts to be fertile ground for the recruitment of foreign fighters for the Islamic State (IS). The country, however, has proven such analysts wrong by having only a handful of pro-IS cases so far.”

According to a US State Department report titled ‘Country Reports on Terrorism 2020: India’, “There were 66 known Indian-origin fighters affiliated with ISIS, as of November” (2020).

Within this small number of Indian recruits, however, individuals belonging to southern India make up about 90%, according to intelligence agencies. The ORF report cited above noted that the majority of India’s IS recruits came from Kerala, with the state accounting for “40 of the 180 to 200 cases” across the country. Most recruits from Kerala who joined the IS were either working in the Gulf or had come back from there with an already developed liking for the IS’s extreme ideology.

What about the four girls whose story the film portrays?

The film claims to be based on the story of four women who converted to Islam and travelled with their husbands to Afghanistan to join ISIS between 2016 and 2018. They are currently incarcerated in an Afghan prison.

In December 2019, interviews of four women from Kerala – Nimisha alias Fathima Isa, Merin alias Mirriam, Sonia Sebastian alias Ayisha and Rafaella – were published under the title ‘Khorasan Files: The Journey of Indian Islamic State Widows’ by the website StratNewsGlobal.

The film uses the story of these four women to paint a larger picture of alleged Islamic State recruitment in Kerala.