The Kerala Story, a Hindi film directed by Sudipto Sen, has been making headlines ever since its teaser debuted in 2017. The Censor Board has awarded the film, which will be released on May 5, a ‘A’ rating. According to reports, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) removed 10 scenes, one of which was an interview with a former chief minister of Kerala. The chief minister of Kerala is reportedly VS Achuthanandan.
There were also “dialogues and inappropriate references to all Hindu Gods” in another sequence that is thought to have been cut. Evidently, several dialogues were changed as well. There was a discussion that allegedly said, “Indian Communists are the biggest hypocrites,” but the word Indian was allegedly removed.
In a TV interview, a former chief minister of Kerala predicted that due to youth conversion to Islam, Kerala would become a Muslim-majority state over the next two decades. The CBFC demanded that the whole television interview be cut from the movie.
When the preview for The Kerala Story, which was released in November 2022 and featured a character named Shalini Unnikrishnan aka Fatima Ba, claimed that 32,000 women had been recruited in Kerala by the Islamic State (IS) terror group and that she was one of them, it caused a stir.
The Kerala administration and the leaders of the opposition are currently calling for the state to outlaw the movie. The Hindi movie was not wanted to be released there by the CPM or the Congress, but movie theatres had a different perspective. The public would eventually view the movie on OTT, according to movie exhibitors, thus it is best to release it in theatres.
A Rs 1 lakh bounty has been offered by the Muslim Youth League of Kerala to anyone who can show that IS radicalised 32,000 Malayali women.
The CBFC Examining Committee is said to have requested official paperwork to support the amount stated in the teaser.
